What Grows in Harley Weir’s Garden
Published on elephant.art.
The closing chapter of Voltaire’s 1759 satirical novella, Candide, ou l’Optimisme, sees the eponymous protagonist’s companion remind him of the trials and tribulations that they underwent throughout their odyssey. He is sure that, had this sequence of disasters not happened, Candide would not have been led to where he is now: to the best of all possible worlds. Had he not been evicted from his castle, not been caught in a vicious storm, not survived the wreck, an earthquake, a tsunami, and a fire, not been found and flogged by the Portuguese Inquisition, not travelled across South America on foot, and not lost his sheep, Candide would not have been there, then, to feast upon candied citrus and pistachio nuts from their farm. “Excellently observed,” replies Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”
The novella is a critique and denunciation of optimism — of the belief that God, being perfect and just, could not have created an imperfect world; misfortunes must cancel each other out in a grand design that surpasses human shortsightedness! Candide also happens to be one of photographer Harley Weir’s favourite books. Her current solo exhibition at Hannah Barry Gallery, The Garden, visualises the tension between the pinnacle and the pipe dream of whatever this garden is, between idealistic teenage expectations and the confused, mundane mess of life’s various comings of age.
Upstairs, on the gallery’s first floor, nostalgia floats. Twenty-eight new works line the walls, memorabilia collected from Weir’s adolescence — a personal archive of letters from pen pals, passport photos, postcards, dried petals, and early prints — carefully arranged and embedded between translucent handmade paper sheets. Many are sparse, some are filled with crumpled papers and running ink, though all are delicate and bittersweet. The room acts as a mausoleum of innocence and anticipation carried by first experiences in frosted-sugar tones; girlhood is long gone, friendships have dissolved, and the faces of boys once obsessed over faded from memory. The compositions also reveal the ongoing influences on Weir’s work, from masculine bodies (men I would like to meet, 2025) to classical ideals (venus, 2025).
The collection of work exhibited on the gallery’s ground floor is darker. Produced over the past decade, these photographs are visual recollections of and reflections on a second coming of age at thirty-five, and the desires and decay that accompany it. The work is as personal as it is universal, and Weir’s subjects are seraphic, unguarded, and human as ever. Bodies are presented alongside animals or stone (Function, 2015), or near the crumpled nylon refuse sacks they produce, heaped and burning (Walls, 2015) — some are even falsities altogether (I want a perfect body, 2015). Weir’s ongoing darkroom experiments fuse blood, sperm, vitamins, and other materials with film processing chemicals, inflicting scratches and stains onto the skin of her models: butterfly wings are scattered across a woman’s cheek (Egg, 2023) while hormones burn against the swollen stomach of an expectant mother, neon and harsh (Egg, 2025). At times, the process devours the original composition whole, the acids eating it into an abstraction, like forgotten scrap metal left out to peel and rust in a neglected front yard (Marlboro, 2025).
Harley Weir’s garden is, she explains, both the pinnacle and the pipe dream. It’s a physical space of seed and growth where the fruits and effects of planting and pruning are tangible and calming, as well as a symbol of beginning and end, Eden and utopia — an alive and ever-elusive world within a world. The exhibition reflects both a longing for and suspicion of this supposed paradise throughout her life: can what you sow be reaped? What if you no longer crave its taste?
I spoke with Weir over the phone one afternoon as she sat in her London garden, just as the sun disappeared behind a cloud.
Alma Feigis: It’s such a gorgeous show that you’ve got on at Hannah Barry Gallery.
Harley Weir: I’m really glad to hear that. It was a tough show to make and to put together, and a very personal one. I haven’t been in the best place the last few years, and I wasn’t in the mood at all to be on show. I’m very complimented when anyone says that it seems to have worked, because, God, this one felt hard.
I’m interested in why you chose the garden as the idea to cover this collection of work. It reminded me of a book, Candide, by Voltaire. Do you know it?
Yes! It was one of my favourite books when I was a teenager — I must have read it three times. I haven’t thought about it for a while. But I love how the protagonist, Candide, spends the book searching for this beautiful woman, Cunégonde, for this paradise, but by the time he finds her, she’s become hideous and frazzled, with bloodshot eyes. There’s something in the show about grotesqueness and the disillusionment that can come with ageing. Upstairs is the first coming-of-age, when you’re young, full of promise and excited for life, and downstairs is when you’re starting to reach “your expiry” — which a friend once told me she was told on a date! Doctors tell you that your fertility takes a huge hit once you arrive at thirty-five, and reaching that feels like a second coming-of-age where, well, by medical standards, you are expiring — your fecundity is disappearing. It’s a scary time for a lot of women who are part of a culture that’s so fearful of age. Even if you aren’t thinking about having children, or you don’t want them, it’s a question that’s constantly put upon you. Another book that inspired the show was Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. The work downstairs is the fear of getting to this garden and realising that, though you’ve been searching for it your whole life, this fairytale might not be what you were looking for.
While you show plants being pollinated by insects in a way that’s almost erotic and sacred, you photograph human bodies with skin folded, wrinkled, covered in mud, puckered from the cold, ruptured or clung onto by the head of another, smaller being. Would you say that the way you depict bodies in your personal work is a reaction to the ideals in your editorial work?
This is the kind of thing that I’m interested in on my own time, regardless. I’m interested in that more grotesque side of beauty — that’s what I find most beautiful. There’s a grotesqueness that is inherent in me, and it’s far stronger than anything you’ll ever see in any gallery. A couple of my friends were telling me that the pictures were really intense, but I feel that the show’s quite pedestrian. I would have gone much further if I weren’t thinking of the other. When you work with other people’s bodies, that’s their body, you know? I’m very conscious of not making people feel bad about themselves and showing people in their best light, even though it might be more realistic and more helpful not to. I always battle with that, and I think that’s something that fashion has curbed. But perhaps it makes for a good balance. I also feel bound to the audience in some sense, and to keeping a beauty to it. People are drawn to beauty, so it does become helpful for packaging a message. Images are amazing, and working in fashion is such a great chance to change culture a little bit. I know it sounds crazy, but people do look at fashion images. Even if the changes seem minimal, they’re still moves in the right direction, and they feel worthy and useful.
I want to ask about the image of the baby’s head emerging from its mother, mid-birth. How did that opportunity come about?
I had quite a few friends agree to let me photograph their birth, but when it comes down to it, it’s never a good time. I waited three or four years to be able to take that picture. In the end, I posted something in a hospital that said something like, “Photographer seeking birth image, who wants to do it?” A bunch of people replied, but only one — this lovely poet couple — called me when they went into labour. It was pretty hardcore. I came at four in the morning on Christmas Day, in almost complete darkness.
That’s mental. Merry Christmas, everyone.
Yeah, the Messiah is born.
A few of the images in the show are new works in your Sickos series. You’ve spoken about your experimentation in the darkroom, an unpredictable space where failure can’t exist. Ceramics and gardening both share that quality and process; they’re ancient and ritualistic, and quite hard to control. They require patience, and there’s a mess and smell and texture to them. What processes and materials did you use for these images?
I was going to get my eggs frozen, but I decided to back out of it at the last minute. I couldn’t give back the medication, so I had all these chemicals and hormone injections, which I used for Egg. I also used to be on the pill when I was younger and had a lot of leftover oestrogen pills, and I was excited to see what these chemicals would do to the paper. Pretty much all of the fluids I used on the Sicko works are waste products. It’s very fun, and it’s very much like glazing, as you said — you put it into the kiln, wet, and you take it out, not knowing what happened. There’s the same element of surprise and gamble, which I like. It keeps life interesting. Another work, Marlborough, came from a mistake. I was sweating because the show was looming and I was trying to print, but my machine wasn’t working. It kept chewing up and crumpling all the prints, as you can see, so I ended up making that one out of distress! But I think the best art is born from mistakes.
For sure. The hanging of the works in space and their arrangement in relation to each other are very unique. Was there a certain intention behind this display?
Hannah Barry really helped me with that — she was being quite radical, and I was game. I had quite a lot of work, and people often think that if a show’s overhung, it’s no good, but I love to overhang. I like it to be hung like the horse in the show! We kept a lot of stuff back — Hannah’s good at taming the beast. It was her idea to put the singular image of the blood on the floor on its own entire wall, and I was like, “Nothing else? Are you sure we don’t want to add six more works around it?”
When Hannah speaks, you listen. It really works. Many of the images are large and heavy and dark, and when they’re piled on top of each other, it feels quite intense when you walk in there.
It also somehow makes it feel less intense than if the images were lined up in a row. There’s something about them becoming a bit of a pattern — they become symbols. It’s not about the man in the plastic wrap or the woman in the T-shirt. They’re not supposed to be seen on their own; they’re a message altogether. It’s nice that they’re jumbled up because it helps you see them as a whole as a story.
Upstairs in the gallery, you present a new series of work, love at first sight, which reflects on adolescence using materials from your past. How did revisiting this archive of formative moments affect you?
I’ve had a very intense past few years, full of a lot of big life changes. More recently, I’ve just gotten engaged, so I’ve come to a new chapter in my life. I think you sometimes have to go back and look at yourself to move on. Love at first sight includes letters addressed to me from my childhood friends. They were disturbing to read, and I honestly wanted to burn them at first. Well, they’re not that bad, but sitting down and reading a diary of yourself as a tween through the voices of your peers is so cringey and bizarre. Being ten to thirteen years old, which is the age at which the letters were written, is a very extreme age for girls. You become so obsessed with your friends because you’re trying to pull away from your parents and find yourself in the world. It was carnage. The whole show could be mistaken for a big, massive, self-indulgent bag of baggage. But it’s very much that: my baggage. I also didn’t want to throw them away, though. I’ve been collecting, or I guess hoarding, these nostalgic articles for so long, and they stayed amazingly pristine. This work is exactly what I would have wanted to do with my letters if I were ten, if not send them to space for an alien to find, or put them in a time capsule and bury them. Very Y2K.
It almost looks like they’re frosted and frozen in ice because of the paper layered on top. The work diverges from your typical photography practice. What drew you to this form of image-making and these materials?
The process started while I was putting paper onto the Sicko prints, and I thought, God, it would be nice to do this not in complete darkness. You can’t see anything whatsoever when you’re in the darkroom — you’re all messy and there’s rubbish everywhere. It’s not the nicest process and I was quite sick of it. I wanted to do things more in the light, and I realised that I had these stacks of paper. At first, I was going to mulch it all and recycle it to make new paper, but then I found a technique which preserved it.
Along with the letters, you’ve embedded the paper with collages of old prints you took as a teenager, as well as delicate natural elements, like pressed flowers.
Yeah, there were often passport photos and other artefacts stuck into the letters we sent to one another, girls showing me the guys they fancied, etcetera. I covered that private information with petals so that no one would get in trouble, and I also crumpled a lot of the letters in the same way that the prints downstairs had been destroyed. There’s a common thread of destruction in this crumpling that somehow made sense to me. What was nice was that, for some of the letters, the text washed away as I was making the paper. It just disappeared like invisible ink.
It’s lovely because the ink is still there, technically, even though the words aren’t.
Yes, I like that — secrets never to be told!
You speak of the garden as both “the pinnacle and the pipe dream” in the exhibition text — can you elaborate on that? Is it hopeful or disillusioned, or both?
I’ve always wanted a garden, quite physically and simply because I love gardening. And when I would mention that to people, they would always reference the symbol of the garden. In the Bible, the Garden of Eden is almost a beautiful prison; if you take a step wrong or eat the apple, hoping for knowledge, you’re banished! When I was making the show, I was in a very disillusioned state. My dad unfortunately got very unwell — there are two prints of him in the show. Every image is an amalgamation of all the trauma of the last few years. I had been keeping this idea of the garden in my head as the place where I was going, this promised land. Then it dawned on me that this garden might be an illusion — a beautiful pipe dream. Do I actually want that garden? I do! But the garden will likely be full of the same pain that I’m in now. It won’t heal anything, so there was an attempt to put that idea away and just be present.
I’m really sorry about your dad.
It sucks, but that’s life, and that’s also what the garden is about. That’s why it’s nice that you mentioned that book, Candide. Didn’t Voltaire write it because there was a massive earthquake that killed lots of people? Throughout the book, one character keeps repeating, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” or something, and Voltaire satirises this excessive optimism and faith in a world of suffering. I think the work downstairs is a lot about that. It’s a backlash against optimism.
Definitely. But at the end of the book, Candide realises that “we must cultivate our garden” in this accepting, chop wood, carry water sense.
The garden is also that very real and physical thing. I’m not particularly religious, but for me, gardening is the closest you can get to God. There’s a meditative aspect to planting something in the ground. It feels so real, especially if you grow vegetables. Whenever people ask me what I want, where my aspirations are, I tell them that I want a garden. To be able to go outside and eat what you’ve grown is just the most beautiful thing in the world. There aren’t hundreds, but one of the things that I love about London is the gardens. I think we have some of the best gardens in any city in the world — a lot of gardens for a place where the weather doesn’t let you sit in them much!
What would your perfect garden grow?
I collect caudex plants, which grow their roots above the ground. They look ugly, like potatoes, but I would love to have a hot, desert garden where I could let them grow to their full size. It would look kind of like Socotra, that Yemeni island where all plants look wild and bulbous. But I would plant some vegetables first.