Coming Soon: Is This A Garden? and The Perfect Flower

LOOK Photo Biennial 2026

Launch: 25 June / 6–8pm / Open Eye Gallery / RSVP

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.

Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps, curators, said: “What interested us was not photographs of gardens so much as photographs where gardens are present in the background of everyday life. Bringing these works together has allowed us to think about gardens as social spaces shaped by history, class, labour, and personal experience, and we hope audiences find new ways of looking at these often-overlooked environments.”

The gallery wall facing Canning Dock is dedicated to our current public open call, Gardens. Everyone is invited to send in photographs made in gardens – we’ll be printing them and adding them to the exhibition.

Is This A Garden? is developed in partnership with The centre for research in Art & Design at Birmingham City University.

Gallery 3 shows Yan Wang Preston’s The Perfect Flower project, including photographs, a projection and a short film. This project charts the development of hydrangeas in the UK, starting from a reproduction of the oldest hydrangea specimen in Britain. Developed through close observation of the RHS Hydrangea paniculata trials, the work reflects on how flowers are classified, valued and perfected. The work also reflects on the cultural and historical implications embedded in horticulture, including colonial histories that shaped the introduction and commercialisation of plants.

“What is a perfect flower? How do we go about getting them? Why such an impulse?” – Yan Wang Preston.

The Perfect Flower is part of The OFFSHOOT Artist in Residence programme, which is a collaboration between University of Salford Art Collection, RHS Garden Bridgewater and Open Eye Gallery,  generously supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.