Garden Stories, Hidden Labours
April 7 – May 1, 2016
The series Garden Stories, made around the glasshouses and outbuildings of an English country garden, captures accidental still lifes that reveal the often-unseen work of gardeners. Through traces of daily tasks—nurturing seedlings, protecting plants, harvesting, and gathering flowers—it embodies their labour and uncovers the hidden stories of the garden and those who care for it. More broadly, my work explores our relationship with the land and the impact of human intervention on landscape and wilderness. My current project, The Frith Fields, documents the restoration of three meadows, using field material on light-sensitive paper to create fragile, ephemeral images. These works reflect both the delicacy of the ecosystems they depict and the quiet power of individual stewardship.
“By uncovering the small signs of the day to day—the tending of plants, their protection from insects, disease and weather; the nurturing of seedlings and tender plants in the glasshouses, the harvesting, drying and storing of crops, and the gathering of flowers to be arranged and placed in the house—these observations seek to embody the gardener’s labours and to reveal the unseen stories of the gardens, and those who tend them.”
Garden Stories is the 2015 Critical Mass Solo Exhibition Award presented in collaboration with Photolucida.
Amanda Harman is an award-winning British photographer whose work explores beauty, belonging, and our connection to the natural world. Based in the Southwest of England, she draws inspiration from the watery landscapes of the Somerset Levels and the valleys surrounding her home near Stroud, Gloucestershire.
Her work has received international recognition, including the Sony World Photography Award for Still Life (2014) and shortlisting in the Landscape category (2018) and Still Life category (2025). In 2016, she won the Critical Mass Solo Exhibition Award with the series ‘Garden Stories’, leading to a solo show at the Blue Sky Centre for Photographic Arts in Portland, Oregon.
She is the author of four photobooks: A Fluid Landscape (2018), Garden Stories (2020), Sun Lights This Water (2022), and The Frith Fields (2025). Her work has been exhibited widely and is represented in public and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The National Science and Media Museum (Bradford) Fidelity Art Collection (Boston) and Rede de Museos (Vigo, Spain).
