How does your garden grow?

Transitional Threads

Artist Statement - Nellien Brewer

Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

With silver bells, and cockle shells,

And pretty maids all in a row.

This nursery rhyme was a part of my childhood growing up. The illustration accompanying the rhyme showed a beautiful Victorian lady amongst daffodils and hollyhocks - the types of flowers associated with gardens that required love and maintenance. To young me, it represented the serene and sheltered environment of dreams and fairytales.

The artwork 'How does your garden grow?' shows an embossed image in the background of the Dutch Reformed Church in Greytown - the church in which I grew up.

A small window in front of it has been filled with embroidered hollyhocks and pretty flowers - flowers from a garden loved and nurtured.

The foreground contains digital images of weeds and grasses pulled from my own garden in Pretoria. Each plant contains a portion of text from the book of Isaiah in one of the SA languages. The series of text weeds was inspired by a Willem Boshoff work titled 'All flesh is grass'. 

These discarded plants, for me, represent the people in our society who are undervalued, abused and neglected. Yet each of them is special and uniquely created. 

May we see them.