"If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives (…) without our awareness the unconscious takes us back to the oldest times of our lives and like fairytales suggest a voyage into the interior of our mind, into the realms of unawareness and the unconscious."
Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment
The Secret Garden is a series of photographs begun in the late 1980s and continuing on to this day. Gina Glover’s family garden is a location which allows her to visually explore personal and family emotional experiences and to revisit her many intertwined and layered memories.
The project began when Glover’s father was terminally ill, in the 1980s. During this time she frequently returned to the garden of her childhood to explore a place which seemed to her full of poignant past experiences.
Caught in a spiral of memories and associations, she encountered long-forgotten patterns of childhood animistic thinking where there exists little separation between inanimate and living things. This is a period when children search for the first and last questions of life: Who am I? How do I to deal with life and its problems? As adults we learn to avoid such questions but Glover now understood how they resurface during periods of stress.
The worn paths and stonework of her pictures evoke not only the past but also the elusive memories of the people who linger there. Her garden is a playground for the reinterpretation of symbols and impressions that have stayed with Glover throughout her life.
