Inspired by one of Gallery director Kitty Clark’s all-time, favourite, classic novels ‘The Secret Garden’ by Frances Hodgson Burnett, as well as the most-beloved 1949 film adaptation is the themed concept for this second End-of-Year group show at Saint Cloche.
In an age over-cluttered by technology and information overload, pandemics, climate crisis and global unrest, it is good to be reminded consciously how infinitely superior is a child’s world reached through the imagination, where to scatter seeds and watch them grow through the earth and flower is a miracle that we cling to for its magic more than ever.
At the heart of the story of ‘The Secret Garden’ is an orphan and her friends – children who spend one Summer bringing back to life a walled-in garden that had been deserted and neglected for many years. It is the story of the spirit of rebirth, that through nurturing nature, life flows back into our own veins once more.
In life what appears to be dead may in fact be lying dormant within the fecund earth, full of potent potentiality and awaiting the right conditions to thrive once again. This tale of transformation is rejoicing in nature, the healing power of the changing seasons and nature’s effect on the human spirit. We nurture nature and nature nourishes us.
Now more than ever, we need to pay attention to how we cultivate the mind because our thoughts become ‘us’, and then ‘we’ become the world. “One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries – as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body.” – The Secret Garden.
