Scene XII: Eden

Matt Carey-Williams is delighted to present his twelfth Scene, ‘Scene XII: Eden’, a ten-person group exhibition that mulls over the signification of The Garden of Eden.

‘Eden’ is an anagram of ‘need’: a fitting logograph given that desire snakes its way through the Biblical tale of Paradise, at first illuminating the light of hope and bounty for Adam and Eve but which ultimately sucks them in to shadows of dereliction and displacement.

The ten artists included in this show – Lewis Brander, Lauren Brown, James Cabaniuk, Martyn Cross, Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Dean Fox, Beatrice Hasell-McCosh, Sam Llewellyn-Jones, Chris Huen Sin-kan and Clare Woods – offer works that explore the ground on which such temples are built, then proclaim their gardens, only to witness their inexorable decay leaving us, finally, to mull over new paeans to presence and absence, love and loss, devotion and dislocation.

From Paradise to Fall, from the language of abundance to more sombre notes of decay, Eden represents the ultimate oxymoron. It is a space that is meant to celebrate a God-given Arcadian bliss but which, instead, draws attention to our innate fallibility; a garden where flowers offer no love for life but rather serve only to witness death.

https://www.mattcareywilliams.com/scenes/scene-xii-eden