Siân Davey's spiritual photography series considers the peaceful properties of the garden

Individuals, couples and groups lounge peacefully amongst an abundant profusion of wildflowers in Siân Davey’s sublime photography series ‘The Garden’. Set within the grounds of her own home, these tender images capture friendship, familial and romantic connection, as nude figures enjoy the privacy of lavish plant life and loved ones embrace amidst towering foliage. Davey began the series during lockdown, in the middle of a traumatic event in her own life which ‘ruptured my whole being’, she tells me, when we speak ahead of the deeply personal project showing at Stills in Edinburgh.

‘What happened in the garden resolved the personal crisis for me,’ she says. ‘If you look at it psychotherapeutically, every difficult situation in life is your teacher.’ While the photographs are the focus of her exhibitions, the garden and its collaborative, ritualistic creation with her son was an integral part of the process. At the time, it was abandoned and overgrown. ‘My son said, “Why don’t we turn our garden into something so beautiful that people would want to be photographed by you in it?” It just made sense. It turned into a three-year project that led me, not the other way around.”

They worked together from early morning until dark, researching soil compositions and biodiversity, while planting in line with moon cycles. The immersive garden contains an explosive mix of wildflowers, gourds, pumpkins, climbers and more. Davey and her son pulled branches up from the river, creating structures for plants to grow against. ‘We weren’t creating an English country garden, it was like anarchy out there,’ she laughs. ‘We wanted something to happen when people saw it. It was chaos, I have never witnessed a space like it. The flowers all opened at once. Everything was growing five or six foot high.’

The garden has a two-foot wall at the back, so passers-by, some of whom visited daily, could see and became intrigued by the developing growth. A pair of lovers were the first to be photographed, two women who had recently started a relationship. They asked to take their clothes off, and the final image shows them peacefully entangled. ‘Ultimately it was saying, can you witness me for everything I am without judgement? We witnessed spirit in the garden in the most insane way. People were visibly moved and disarmed. The project shows us what happens with humanity if we are actually present and witness each other.’

Davey’s years of experience as a humanist Buddhist psychotherapist has fuelled this project. She still practices Tibetan Buddhism and embraced ideas of Daoism and divine order when creating and photographing people in the garden, relinquishing control and the concept of the separate self. ‘When you’re holding a relational space the camera doesn’t really exist,’ she says. ‘I worked very deeply with my subjects. It was a reverential space we were holding; like being at the altar. We aligned ourselves with nature implicitly.’

The community-driven process has been profoundly healing for Davey as well. ‘We’re looking at the world right now and it’s being dismembered, by men especially. If we just stop and hold witness and stop projecting and externalising ourselves then we can change things. That’s what the garden showed me. By the end of the project, I felt completely at peace.’

The Garden is at Stills, Edinburgh until 30 August

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