Burren College of Art warmly invites you to join us for the opening reception for Everything Gardens on Thursday, October 23, from 6-8pm.

Everything makes its own garden, and all art is ecological.*

Everything Gardens is an exhibition of quilts, photographs, and other work by PhD graduate Katerina Gribkoff. For five years, Katerina has researched how the principles of permaculture and systems thinking might be applied to the organisation of an artistic practice. This research is grounded by a deep ecological understanding of all things, living and not, like art, as interconnected. Everything gardens, or shapes the earth. All art is connected to local ecologies, but this connection is often hidden or overlooked. Katerina’s work centres a connection to place, to plants, and to living systems. 

In 2021, she started the Burren Dye Garden project on campus, and has been learning to grow and care for dye plants in the harsh environment of the Burren. From plants like indigo, weld, and coreopsis, among others, she works to synthesise pigments for use as dyes, inks, stains, and paints. Beyond the edges of the garden, Katerina also forages from the hedges, using plants like nettles and sloe berries for colour. She makes quilts from up-cycled cottons, linens, and silks, dyed with the plants she harvests and gathers. They narrate the stories of the garden, abstractly depicting the patterns of the beds and the twisting shapes of the plants themselves.

Working closely with the living systems of the garden and the Burren, Katerina has had to adjust her rhythms of moving and making to the cycles of growth and decay. Time spent harvesting and preserving plants for future use is represented in the displayed samples of dried matter presented alongside the work. Katerina has also documented the garden using a film camera, and photographic prints are included in the exhibition. The photographs and some quilts are framed by elements of the garden infrastructure, like weathered pieces of wood. Other works in this show include a diagram drawn with iron black ink, plant pigments painted onto the wall, and a repurposed wooden structure used to dry plants.

*This phrase references the writing of permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison (Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, 1980) and theorist Timothy Morton (All Art is Ecological, 2021).