Siân Davey’s photographs of her friends and neighbors, pictured amid riotous blooms in the warm sunlight, captures the tenderness that prevailed after a period of enforced stillness during the pandemic.
In the spring of 2020, the photographer Siân Davey was, like much of the rest of humanity, locked down at home with her family. Home in Davey’s case is in Devon, in the South of England, in a rented house on the estate of Dartington Hall, a medieval manse turned outpost of bohemia where her neighbors include both local farmers and internationally celebrated artists.
It took twelve weeks to clear the ground, and hours of painstaking research into seeds and cultivation methods to plant the garden. A year later, when it had grown in, neighbors would stop by and talk. “People were telling us their stories. They had been isolated for a long time, and those stories began to be woven into the garden,” Davey, who worked as a psychotherapist before she took up photography a decade ago, recalled.
The garden itself is exposed—the wall that separates it from the street is only two feet high. We see a gable made of honey-colored stone, a slate roof, evidence of nearby human habitation. Yet the photographs are extremely intimate. Many of Davey’s subjects are topless, or entirely naked—a gesture, she says, that occurred spontaneously at her subjects’ suggestion, rather than at her request.
One local recruit was a neighbor who, during lockdown, took to wearing women’s clothing publicly for the first time. “This person said, ‘I have been doing it for years and I really want to not hide it,’ ” Davey explained. “I said, ‘Why don’t you come to my garden and bring some clothes, and I’ll photograph you?’ We were just kind of playing recklessly in the garden. It was extraordinarily shameless.
After three years, the project had run its course: for all its apparent wildness, the garden requires hours of care daily, which has become more than Davey and her family can manage. “I’m not a full-time gardener,” she said. “I sometimes wish I was, but it’s not my purpose.” With or without her care, the garden will nonetheless keep growing.
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