Is this a Garden?

How do gardens shape the people around them? How do social conditions, histories and environments shape the gardens? What is our relationship to and with plants? Open Eye Gallery is delighted to announce two new exhibitions as part of LOOK Photo Biennial 2026: Is This a Garden? and The Perfect Flower.

Is this a Garden? (Gallery 1 and 2) is curated by Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps. For this exhibition, they’ve been looking at the gardens as the backdrop to everyday life. Yan Wang Preston’s The Perfect Flower project (Gallery 3), charts the development of hydrangeas in the UK, exploring what a perfect flower is and the journey to get it.

The garden is often romanticised in British culture. It is also often the site of emotional and social investment, a space of contestation and a place sanctuary, but what does the British garden look like?

Is This A Garden? shows photographs in which gardens appear only incidentally: on the edges of images, behind subjects, glimpsed through windows, embedded within everyday life rather than presented as grand statements of horticulture or design. In many of these works, the garden was never intended to be the primary subject at all. Gardens emerge in fragments and traces: common birds moving through trees, fabricated scrubland, “gardenettes” in synthetic towns, artificial flora and fauna generated by AI, patches of cultivated land pressed against industrial landscapes, the domestic yards and patios. Collectively, the works ask how gardens shape the people around them, and equally, how social conditions, histories and environments shape the gardens themselves.

Is This A Garden? also explores works from the Open Eye Gallery Archive, including works from the 1984 exhibition Parks and Gardens. This selection focuses on allotments, our relationship to and with plants, as well as social practices of gifting flowers.