Dark Garden: An Installation by Linda Huey

Linda Huey Dark Garden (detail), 2013, medium-fire stoneware with glaze, rebar, wire, metal scraps, glue, wood. Photo by Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano.

With over 40 dark and beautiful but unlikely plant forms, ceramic artist Linda Huey transforms an entire gallery into a somber, courtyard-type garden. This is no ordinary garden. Imagine flowers, seed pods, leaves—all constructed from clay, manufactured steel, rusted rebar metal, and debris. Huey’s four to nine-foot-tall plants have a suggestion of beauty and fragility, but look closer and see mounds of clay earth that appear to be fossilized trash and computer parts, flowers with graffiti, black fairies, decayed gnomes, broken antennas, leaves infested with cars. Her garden grows with compelling dualities: nature versus culture, organic versus man-made, life versus decay. Huey’s concern for the natural environment is apparent as she explores problematic aspects of culture through her sculptures. Her exhibition asks the question—Can art make a difference and change the values of society?