The Abandoned Garden was once tended by an eccentric artist and amateur botanist who collected rare plants based on their evolutionary niche. The artist's diverse collections were vast but many of them became surprisingly overgrown by a new conglomerate species of pink-yellow crusty lichen that proliferated in the garden.
The lichen, which has no name, has developed a symbiotic relationship with the surviving plants to form a novel, never-before -seen ecology. The plant collections that persist and thrive in this changed ecology are the ancient plants, the mosses, the flowering swamp plants, and the epiphytes (aka air plants).
The Abandoned Garden exists as a sublime eco-ruin. As a sublime space, it expresses beauty and disgust simultaneously: we think of flowering plants as universally beautiful, yet other plants like liverworts live in damp, dark places and are associated with decay.
The Abandoned Garden plays with these notions to provide multitudes of readings and gives the viewer a sense of deep time. As the ancient plants persist, they need the lichen network to survive and form an ecological relationship that doesn’t exist anywhere else. The Abandoned Garden is from the past and the future at the same time.