Lost Garden I - III
By Cally Trench
Original artworks
Pen and ink drawings on smooth watercolour paper
Framed
Image size: each drawing H: 54cm x W: 67m
Size of framed work: H: 77m x W: 89cm approx
£595 each
The imaginative detail in these three original ink drawings is mesmerising, with their intricate patterns, clever perspective and beautiful narrative touches. One would never tire of looking at these.
In typical style, Cally has drawn them so that they can stand alone or work as a continuous diptych or triptych frieze, with one image leading into the next to form the entire garden scene.
The Lost Garden scenes are a curious amalgamation of source imagery. The tall plants are based on prehistoric extinct trees, especially the trees found fossilised in coal, creating a fantasy jungle canopy held aloft by perfectly straight column-like trunks.
The ancient-style plants below are placed in a 1950s/60s suburban landscape of wrought iron garden gates, fence panels, crazy paving, a shed, a pergola, a greenhouse and a cold frame, modelled on a popular toy of the era: Britain's Floral Gardens. These were plastic miniature gardens, on a scale of 1:32, sold in small packages. Children could buy them with their pocket money and they included flower beds and flowers, garden buildings and furniture, lawn and crazy paving.
Cally says: "Both the unfamiliar prehistoric trees and the familiar style of garden design from my childhood seem equally lost; we are reminded of the fragility of everyday life."
ABOUT CALLY TRENCH
Cally is a versatile, innovative and prolific artist, working in a range of formats. She is wonderful at inventing an artistic concept and then exploring it through a variety of lenses and media.
We were privileged, last year, to be showing her latest Metamorphosis series: very powerful and fascinating drawings of hands and feet from which feathers are sprouting. Humans metamorphosing into birds. She spoke fluently and colourfully about them in the gallery during the summer. The fascinating pieces held "the promise of flight, freedom, an escape to the air; but there is the horrendous loss of human identity and the inevitable separation from all the people that you love.”
The aerial garden series we are showing this year is focused, instead, on nostalgia, home life and childhood, pattern and plenty. They are prime examples of how Cally works her way through a concept to transform it into many forms and moods.
What remains constant is her ingenious and inventive imagination and her remarkable ability to capture detail and deal with an aerial viewpoint.
Cally’s work includes finshed board games (which she designs fron concept through to finished playing games, with pieces and rules), short films, books and drawings. She is based in Buckinghamshire.