Open Eye Gallery unveils two new exhibitions for ‘Look Photo Biennial’ 2026

The Open Eye Gallery has announced two new exhibitions focusing on British gardens as part of the LOOK Photo Biennial 2026

Together, these exhibitions, called ‘Is This a Garden?’ and ‘The Perfect Flower’, examine how gardens influence the communities around them, how social conditions, histories, and environments shape these spaces, and the broader nature of the human relationship with plants.

Spanning Galleries 1 and 2, Is This a Garden? is curated by Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps in partnership with The Centre for Research in Art & Design at Birmingham City University. While the garden is frequently romanticised in British culture as a place of sanctuary, emotional investment, and social contestation, this exhibition investigates what the British garden actually looks like when stripped of traditional ideals. 

The curators focus on photographs where gardens serve merely as the backdrop to everyday life, appearing incidentally on the edges of frames, behind subjects, or glimpsed through windows. In these works, the garden was rarely intended to be the primary subject; instead, it emerges in fragments and traces, such as common birds in trees, fabricated scrubland, synthetic town “gardenettes,” AI-generated flora, domestic patios, and cultivated plots pressed against industrial landscapes. 

Collectively, the imagery analyses the mutual impact between people and these green spaces. The exhibition also features selections from the Open Eye Gallery Archive, including pieces from the 1984 exhibition “Parks and Gardens,” which highlights allotments and the social tradition of gifting flowers. 

Curators Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps said: 

“What interested us was not photographs of gardens so much as photographs where gardens are present in the background of everyday life. 

Bringing these works together has allowed us to think about gardens as social spaces shaped by history, class, labour, and personal experience, and we hope audiences find new ways of looking at these often-overlooked environments.”

In Gallery 3, Yan Wang Preston’s The Perfect Flower project utilises photographs, a projection, and a short film to chart the development of hydrangeas in the UK. The project begins with a reproduction of the oldest known hydrangea specimen in Britain and expands through close observation of the RHS Hydrangea paniculata trials.

The resulting work reflects on how flowers are classified, valued, and engineered toward an ideal, while also addressing the cultural, historical, and colonial legacies that shaped the introduction and commercialisation of plants. Regarding the motivation behind this botanical pursuit, 

Yan Wang Preston said:

“What is a perfect flower? How do we go about getting them? Why such an impulse?” 

This project is part of The Offshoot Artist in Residence programme, a collaboration between the University of Salford Art Collection, RHS Garden Bridgewater, and Open Eye Gallery, generously supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Find out more about the new exhibitions at The Open Eye Gallery here.

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