Orb: Easton Lodge Essex Graphite on board
Orb: The Parterre & fountain Audley End Essex Graphite on paper
Orb: Peto's Italian Garden Easton Lodge Essex Acrylic on board
Orb: Croft's Lodge Audley End Essex Graphite on paper
Orb: Peto's Japanese tea house Easton Lodge Essex Acrylic on board
Orb: Warley Place Essex Graphite on paper
Vista: Cloud Hedge Audley End Acrylic on board
Vista: Fountain Cressing Temple Barns Essex Graphite on paper
Orb: Taking tea at Warley Place Essex Acrylic on board
The Garden Seekers in the Robert Adam Rooms
Audley End House & Gardens
May 13th-October 29th 2023
Essex Gardens Trust artist in residence Jane Frederick invites you to take an optical promenade through the great gardens of Essex, in search of the elusive ‘old garden magic’ described by American author Edith Wharton in her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904).
Since 2021 Jane has been working closely with garden teams, archivists and curators to unravel and reimagine six captivating gardens all listed on the Essex Inventory of Historic Designed Landscapes prepared by Essex Gardens Trust.
Referencing the eighteenth-century spectacle of the painted panorama, the works explore how man-made optical interventions can draw us deeper into gardens and bring their past into focus. Circular artworks (orbs) and panoramas (vistas) respond to the idea of old garden magic in a contemporary context, acknowledging the spirit of the place (genius loci) embodied in the physical combination of man-made and natural elements in the garden.
All the gardens explored through Jane’s work are places where our memories, imagination and lived experiences can combine to create immense new inner landscapes of the mind. They are places where we can daydream. As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his book The Poetics of Space (1958), ‘Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to world that bears the mark of infinity.’
