The Garden Along the Coast

The Garden Along The Coast is a single channel audio/video installation featuring a scenario where many of the problems humanity faces, surrounding colonization and exoticism, manifest. Made in Unreal Engine and Final Cut, the work explores a marshy coastline from the vantage point of a meandering camera examining the organic structures of this particular biome. In the background of these scenes, a kaleidoscope of blue light envelops the narrative sequences as a passage from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book The Secret Garden is read in a throaty and mechanical voice, suggestive of a non-human presence recounting a rejuvenated version of the tale.

The Garden Along The Coast stands as a commentary on existing western literary tropes; it is a metaphor for how colonialism in western speculative fiction still perpetuate ideas of wilderness being something that must be cultivated into a tamed existence by humanity, or offer an escape for our Earthly ills in the frontier lands. And yet, The Garden Along The Coast is an offering of hope, as world-building is a place where problems can be hashed out, possibly resolved, and present an opportunity for humanity to learn.