Holly Chang

Garden into Infinity (2024)

Garden into Infinity explores gardening, indexing, and sewing as a way to process grief. This project was created over a 5-month period where I was experiencing intense concentrations of sadness, anger, and sorrow - I looked towards gardening as a meditation on my emotions. The garden became a reflection into the cycles happening in my life and a portal on which to observe it. Life and death constantly being recycled into infinity, again and again, in the garden. I became obsessed with observing these patterns, of plants I imbued into the earth intentionally, and those who arrived by their own fruition. Why do we instill hierarchy and meaning into some plants and not others? How can the lives of these plants sustain my own life and continue to sustain the lives of other plants around it as it lives and dies, and its particles continue to participate in those cycles.

Cyanotypes became a mechanism in which to perfectly preserve this moment in time, the short window before this organism rapidly decayed and went back to the earth. During this season of the garden, I worked to create over 500 cyanotype images. A scrapbook and a ghost of this period. After the garden closed, I fixed my eyes towards quilting as a framework to reimagine this time. How can these images be transformed in new ways? I found quilting to be the plane to metamorphize by merging this period into a limitless cycle where these organisms could have coexisted or not but now endure simultaneously in this space. My grief reimagined as something soft, an object belonging in the home, something which caused pain and now is a source of comfort.