SÁRA NÉMETHOVÁ

Garden Without Fences

Painting Studio 3

When I compare your older works with your graduate work, I clearly see the motif of nature – a theme you have been exploring for a long time. But you seem to have shifted from painting toward spatial installations, or has this been just a brief detour?
I think that spatial installation is a natural culmination of my work to date. Even in my previous works I worked with the arrangement of pieces in space. I previously related to nature mainly through abstract painting, and my thesis project delves deeper in this direction. It focuses on a specific place and explores the origins of my relationship to it through my family’s gardening business. The installation was created from materials sourced directly from there, and I added photography, which is a new form of presentation for me. I currently enjoy working with materials and finding various ways of adjusting them. I believe I have not exhausted all possibilities in this regard, but I will certainly return to painting in the future.

Your central source of inspiration was the family gardening business and your upbringing there. Did it only provide inspiration for working with natural motifs, or has the idea of nostalgia also been important to you?
I wouldn’t use the word nostalgia, at least I have never thought of it that way. Working with the family gardening business was rather liberating: although nature has always been present in my work, it is only now that I feel I have understood why. It most likely includes a certain element of nostalgia, as I realized my strong connection to the place when I started visiting there more often, perhaps also because it was created around the same time I was born. I first perceived this environment as a playground, later I went there for summer jobs, and nowadays I have been focusing on it through artistic research. The personal aspect is important to me, but understanding the connections is more important than my personal memories.

Gardening is about caring for nature, but it also entails a certain alienation from the original environment: nature is no longer wild, but functions within the boundaries set by people, as a so-called ‘cultivar’. How do you understand this?
I try to thematize this contradiction in my work, and it provides tension. Although people strive for cultivation, the plants and objects used in gardening possess their own strength and vitality. I am not so much interested in “wildness” but rather in how these materials affect us and how they interact with each other as part of a common assemblage, whether it is about degrading plastic or a plant seeking a way out of its allotted space. As part of my installation, I do not take these materials from their context in order to control them, but instead give them space to exert their own agency in new forms.

photo: Polina Davydenko