Hortus Nocte – The Dark Garden

The natural world, from plants to flowers, trees to fruits and vegetables, plays an important role in almost all works of art, whether it be visual art, film, or literature, used to set the scene, invoke emotions, hold metaphorical meaning, A lot of these hidden meanings can be culturally driven, as certain plants can be indigenous to certain localities, while we have attributed various meanings to the more universally available varieties based on a myriad factors.
This notion becomes the basis for UK based, dual national artist David Alesworth’s inquiries in the past decade, who’s latest show “Hortus Norte – The Dark Garden” recently concluded at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi. “Over the past decade his work has been organised around an expanded vision of the garden as ‘global forest’ of which we are all part. The garden is his key metaphor with which to question humanity’s culturally specific relationships with the natural world and to better understand the notion of nature as a social problem,” says his artist profile from the show’s catalogue.
It is evident that Alesworth’s practice is rooted in the environment it is conceived in, his surroundings deeply influencing both his conceptual and visual concerns. “I suggest there is a terroir of art as there is for certain other products of the living earth for as an artist I draw upon the land to understand where I am as much through the natural environment as through the human culture it hosts,” he says in his artist statement. It is through the land and culture he inhabits that he seeks to situate his own identity. During the 90s, he was part of a group of artists who created works drawing from indigenous crafts and the commercial visual urban culture of Karachi, which later came to be known as Karachi Pop.
Upon his move to Lahore, with its post-colonial aesthetic and mix of rich cultural and curated natural environment, he has been engaged with the garden as an allegory to discuss environmental concerns as a product of cultural and social influences. His second career as researcher of garden histories and a professional landscape artist, while an excuse to get out of the studio, clearly began feeding into his practice as well. This manifested in the form of his textile interventions of embroidered maps of famous parks of London on restored Kashan carpets, which themselves invoke the idea of the Charbagh and Gardens of Paradise in Islamic culture.
The current body of work at Canvas Gallery is an extension of this, using a similar language to talk about global warming and the ecological crisis mankind is swiftly hurtling towards. Here too the artist addresses his dichotomous existence, living and working between Bristol and Lahore and influenced by his physical environment in the form of the Sambucus Nigra Var. which grows outside the artist’s studio in Bristol and makes an appearance in some of these works. “I have both travelled and dwelled, experiencing the garden through the lens of another culture and it is simultaneously geologic, post-colonial, anthropogenic and aspirational. It is in microcosm our collective environmental crisis and an ever-present reminder of the angst of these dark times,” he says.
The intervention on these carpets covers the beautiful flower motifs and representation of lush vegetation with black wool embroidery, creating a morbid visual that touches upon themes of environmental degradation. “I see it as an eclipse in the reign of natural fecundity that is this earth, a dimming of the biosphere as the planet heats up and late capitalism eats everything it encounters,” says Alesworth. Black as a color invokes a sense of death and decay, almost an antithesis of the natural lush greens and bright hues of fruits and flowers. In the series of prints with black and grey embroidery, these flowers are taken over with these ashen shades through a process that can be both hand-made and industrial. As its true beauty is suffocated by commercial and cultural activity, this becomes a form of erasure.
Concerns of global warming and mankind’s frivolous endangering of its natural environment are more blatantly discussed in works like “Original Sin” and “Coal House Fire II”, working with coal as a material and bringing its ecological consequences, both as a result of its mining and its industrial use, into the work. while the print and textile works carry multiple metaphorical layers, these works make the commentary a bit on the nose and flatten the narrative being presented.
More interesting are the social and cultural implications layered into the works. The garden itself is kind of a taming of the wilderness of natural growth, giving it a curated beauty that may be subjective and specific to culture and place. Wild growth is geographically specific, certain plants indigenous to certain areas but as man interacts with these, making use of their medicinal, culinary and aesthetic properties, they influence the culture of the land while at the same time being influenced by it. Yet, when it comes to gardening and horticultural arts, it becomes a sort of covert destructive act that asserts control over nature and puts it through a cultural mold for the aesthetic pleasure of a predominantly aristocratic society. In this sense, Adnan Madani aptly calls gardens “erasures and wars”. He talks about the striking contrast of Emperor Babar’s love of gardens and penchant for violence and war. Gardening also becomes a form of conquest over nature, and a rather patronizing form of exploration and appreciation of a foreign culture. “…their real joys and pleasures are delicate and sensory and spiritual and bloodthirsty all at the same time. They are erasing, and at war, with an outside they themselves produce as a wilderness. This outside, in turn – wilderness, nature, the animal, the more-than-human, unruly matter – does not hesitate to erase us and invade our encampments. Everyone knows that nature is a terrorist,” says Madani. The act of colonization similarly treated entire cultures as wild barbarianism that needed to be civilized and cultured by the white man, and those that chose to raise a cry for freedom ironically become colored as villains and silenced. The Kashan textile interventions sit neatly on this metaphor, and thus also touch upon themes of cultural hegemony, imperialism and erasure.
What appears to be an ode to nature and our current environmental crisis goes far beyond, at once quite simple and notoriously complex. It is a layering of two lands, cultures, identities, and histories which the artist seems to be attempting to negotiate and resolve through his practice. While a garden may provide aesthetic relief and an idyllic escape from the daily urban grind, this dark garden lights the way to reveal hard truths and the ugliness hiding in our natural and cultural landscape.

The natural world, from plants to flowers, trees to fruits and vegetables, plays an important role in almost all works of art, whether it be visual art, film, or literature, used to set the scene, invoke emotions, hold metaphorical meaning, A lot of these hidden meanings can be culturally driven, as certain plants can be indigenous to certain localities, while we have attributed various meanings to the more universally available varieties based on a myriad factors.
This notion becomes the basis for UK based, dual national artist David Alesworth’s inquiries in the past decade, who’s latest show “Hortus Norte – The Dark Garden” recently concluded at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi. “Over the past decade his work has been organised around an expanded vision of the garden as ‘global forest’ of which we are all part. The garden is his key metaphor with which to question humanity’s culturally specific relationships with the natural world and to better understand the notion of nature as a social problem,” says his artist profile from the show’s catalogue.
It is evident that Alesworth’s practice is rooted in the environment it is conceived in, his surroundings deeply influencing both his conceptual and visual concerns. “I suggest there is a terroir of art as there is for certain other products of the living earth for as an artist I draw upon the land to understand where I am as much through the natural environment as through the human culture it hosts,” he says in his artist statement. It is through the land and culture he inhabits that he seeks to situate his own identity. During the 90s, he was part of a group of artists who created works drawing from indigenous crafts and the commercial visual urban culture of Karachi, which later came to be known as Karachi Pop.
Upon his move to Lahore, with its post-colonial aesthetic and mix of rich cultural and curated natural environment, he has been engaged with the garden as an allegory to discuss environmental concerns as a product of cultural and social influences. His second career as researcher of garden histories and a professional landscape artist, while an excuse to get out of the studio, clearly began feeding into his practice as well. This manifested in the form of his textile interventions of embroidered maps of famous parks of London on restored Kashan carpets, which themselves invoke the idea of the Charbagh and Gardens of Paradise in Islamic culture.
The current body of work at Canvas Gallery is an extension of this, using a similar language to talk about global warming and the ecological crisis mankind is swiftly hurtling towards. Here too the artist addresses his dichotomous existence, living and working between Bristol and Lahore and influenced by his physical environment in the form of the Sambucus Nigra Var. which grows outside the artist’s studio in Bristol and makes an appearance in some of these works. “I have both travelled and dwelled, experiencing the garden through the lens of another culture and it is simultaneously geologic, post-colonial, anthropogenic and aspirational. It is in microcosm our collective environmental crisis and an ever-present reminder of the angst of these dark times,” he says.
The intervention on these carpets covers the beautiful flower motifs and representation of lush vegetation with black wool embroidery, creating a morbid visual that touches upon themes of environmental degradation. “I see it as an eclipse in the reign of natural fecundity that is this earth, a dimming of the biosphere as the planet heats up and late capitalism eats everything it encounters,” says Alesworth. Black as a color invokes a sense of death and decay, almost an antithesis of the natural lush greens and bright hues of fruits and flowers. In the series of prints with black and grey embroidery, these flowers are taken over with these ashen shades through a process that can be both hand-made and industrial. As its true beauty is suffocated by commercial and cultural activity, this becomes a form of erasure.
Concerns of global warming and mankind’s frivolous endangering of its natural environment are more blatantly discussed in works like “Original Sin” and “Coal House Fire II”, working with coal as a material and bringing its ecological consequences, both as a result of its mining and its industrial use, into the work. while the print and textile works carry multiple metaphorical layers, these works make the commentary a bit on the nose and flatten the narrative being presented.
More interesting are the social and cultural implications layered into the works. The garden itself is kind of a taming of the wilderness of natural growth, giving it a curated beauty that may be subjective and specific to culture and place. Wild growth is geographically specific, certain plants indigenous to certain areas but as man interacts with these, making use of their medicinal, culinary and aesthetic properties, they influence the culture of the land while at the same time being influenced by it. Yet, when it comes to gardening and horticultural arts, it becomes a sort of covert destructive act that asserts control over nature and puts it through a cultural mold for the aesthetic pleasure of a predominantly aristocratic society. In this sense, Adnan Madani aptly calls gardens “erasures and wars”. He talks about the striking contrast of Emperor Babar’s love of gardens and penchant for violence and war. Gardening also becomes a form of conquest over nature, and a rather patronizing form of exploration and appreciation of a foreign culture. “…their real joys and pleasures are delicate and sensory and spiritual and bloodthirsty all at the same time. They are erasing, and at war, with an outside they themselves produce as a wilderness. This outside, in turn – wilderness, nature, the animal, the more-than-human, unruly matter – does not hesitate to erase us and invade our encampments. Everyone knows that nature is a terrorist,” says Madani. The act of colonization similarly treated entire cultures as wild barbarianism that needed to be civilized and cultured by the white man, and those that chose to raise a cry for freedom ironically become colored as villains and silenced. The Kashan textile interventions sit neatly on this metaphor, and thus also touch upon themes of cultural hegemony, imperialism and erasure.
What appears to be an ode to nature and our current environmental crisis goes far beyond, at once quite simple and notoriously complex. It is a layering of two lands, cultures, identities, and histories which the artist seems to be attempting to negotiate and resolve through his practice. While a garden may provide aesthetic relief and an idyllic escape from the daily urban grind, this dark garden lights the way to reveal hard truths and the ugliness hiding in our natural and cultural landscape.