Perpetual Garden

Many artists create works in series. As they explore an idea, it makes sense to return to the aesthetic problem again and again, resulting in a body of work that can be exhibited or published as a group. The opportunity for visual artists to have books published about their work is getting harder all the time. Galleries publish fewer exhibition catalogs than they used to, and the economies of scale make art books that are unconnected to a large exhibition rare. Maddison Colvin has used the limited edition art book as a way to gather recent images into publication. Her latest effort, published by Slow Worm Press, is Perpetual Garden. It includes reproductions of photographs, scans, paintings, drawings, and an essay by the artist. We asked Maddison about the new, beautiful book. She writes, “Our relationships with gardens have been symbolic from the beginning: Eden, utopia, a fallen world, wealth, beauty, entropy, control, death, new life. This book contains the past five years of my painting, photography, research, and writing trying to get my mind around these patterns. The most thrilling thing to me is that, 250 pages later, I find the garden more unfamiliar than ever, totally confounded, as rich with meaning as it is with living things.” (Available now from the publisher.)