The Garden, Harley Weir28 Images
The garden has always been a mythologised space, from the biblical Eden, to the imagined paradise of Arcadia, to the forbidden Garden of Hesperides. All of these spaces are charged with longing in the popular imagination, representing something perfect or utopian, just out of humanity’s grasp. Even in cities like London, the garden can feel a bit mythical – a room of your own is expensive enough, but a patch of private outdoor space? Pure luxury, and a fantasy all of its own.
But the deeper beauty of a garden lies in the fact that it never truly submits to us. We can try to fence it off, weed it, prune it, or shape it neatly around our dining furniture, but we can never fully control it. It’s the wider lesson of nature, and it applies to us, too: no matter how sterile our lives become, how much we try and control our appearance, health and baser impulses, we’re still bound to the same seasonal rhythms, and the same merciless forces of time, decay and regrowth. These are some of the ideas that take root in Harley Weir’s latest exhibition, The Garden, now open at Hannah Barry Gallery in Peckham. The show reads like a coming-of-age study split in two: two stages of womanhood, separated upstairs (adolescence) and downstairs (post-35).
Like much of Weir’s work, the body is the principal focus. The Garden reckons with the greater forces that many women contend with: irrepressible carnal desire, the maternal instinct, bodily transformation and the overpowering drive for connection. Portraits of male sex workers with clients, taken from her Men At Work series, sit alongside confrontational images of birth – babies slick with blood, mouths latched to breasts. Weir’s own ambivalence around the question of motherhood is explored too, with some artworks smeared in letrozole, a hormone used during egg freezing. (Weir herself, now 36, seriously considered the procedure, but opted out at the last minute).
But this show marks a deeper, more vulnerable shift for the photographer. There are spiritual undercurrents everywhere, a grappling not just with youth and desire, but with grief, ageing and the divine. In some of the show’s most moving images, we see her dad, who has been diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome – a rare form of Alzheimer’s that affects visual processing and can make it difficult to recognise faces or environments. He appears tortured and distant, in two close-up portraits, suspended in the depths of his own mind. “I couldn’t even really deal with it until recently, but the images are really important to me because they are a kind of acceptance of the situation and a springboard to talk about it with others,” Weir explains, speaking over the phone. Below, she tells us more about the themes that inspired the show.
Tell us about The Garden’s origins – when was the seed first planted for this show?
Harley Weir: It’s been quite a rough few years, for everyone, I feel. I’ve always had this dream of having a garden. It’s the endpoint for me, it’s something I’m always working towards. The garden is a rich metaphor, too: every religion in the world has a garden, like Eden, the garden of paradise. Even the word paradise supersedes current religion and comes from Persia, meaning a large walled garden. I was thinking about this desire for a garden, and then loosening the ties of that reality and wondering if it was a real want, or if it was just a metaphor to keep me going through these hard times.
I’ve known death, and that is hard, but when the body is still alive, but the person’s spirit has left? That’s very complex, because there is still a fragment lingering
Upstairs takes us into your first ‘coming of age’, with lots of letters and ephemera from your adolescence and pre-teen years. And then downstairs, we’re taken into your second coming of age, which you suggest starts at around 35. What is it about that age? What shifts for a woman at that time?
Harley Weir: If you go and get a health check, that’s when they start asking lots of questions, like: ‘Have you frozen your eggs? How old are you? Do you want to have kids?’ I’ve also been told numerous times that, after 35, your fertility dramatically declines, so I guess it’s when the countdown begins. When you put your career first, it can feel like you’re ahead of the game, but if you want a family, you find yourself far behind. It can be a stressful time, even if you don’t want them, because people still put all this pressure on you. Like, ‘are you sure you don’t want kids? You’d be such a good mother!’ As a woman, you’re not really allowed to avoid it either way.
I wanted to ask about your dad, and your decision to include him in the show.
Harley Weir: My dad was diagnosed with Bensons disease (PCA), which isn’t exactly Alzheimer’s, but it’s a degenerative brain disorder. It’s a visual one, where you basically forget how to understand seeing, it moves a lot faster than normal Alzheimer’s. You can be diagnosed very young, and my dad was diagnosed at about 56. I’ve known death, and that is hard, but when the body is still alive, but the person’s spirit has left? That’s very complex, because there is still a fragment lingering. It is a disease that does, unfortunately, seem to destroy everything around it. My dad wanted to be euthanised, but once you’re diagnosed, you can’t, because you’re not deemed of sound mind.
I wasn’t sure if I should put those images of him in the show. I couldn’t even really deal with it until recently, but the images are really important to me because they are a kind of acceptance of the situation and a springboard to talk about it with others. It’s good to talk to people who have similar problems in their families, and so many do. It’s really important, especially in the UK, where we don’t really talk about things.
Did you find that your relationship with spirituality changed in your second coming of age?
Harley Weir: I lost someone last year, and that definitely made me feel more spiritual than ever. I’d lost my grandma some years before, and my grandpa recently, that was really hard, but this was extra hard because it was a young person, and it was an intimate relationship. Sex can be quite a spiritual thing; it can make you feel deeply connected to people in an abstract way. That death really changed something in me. Before that, I’d always been very unspiritual – I read once that some people can be hypnotised, for example, and that others just aren’t able to be. It’s almost genetic, something to do with your brain, where some people just don’t let that kind of energy in. I always just felt I’m not one of those people. But then, I don’t know, after that happened last summer, there was something in me that felt like exploring more. I was reading a lot about death, which makes you question everything, because of course that’s our biggest unknown. I definitely feel a lot more open-minded about everything since then.
So grief is a big part of this show?
Harley Weir: It’s a funeral, for a few friends. Grief is a part of life, and there are many beautiful things you can take from these experiences. So many crazy things I just couldn’t even believe, bizarre coincidences and occurrences that make you question everything. I’m still fairly unreachable, spiritually, but I’m becoming much more open-minded to the sixth sense and beyond. I definitely feel like I had a spiritual awakening in the last year.
The Garden is running at London’s Hannah Barry Gallery until September 13
