“A garden is a capsule, as well as a portal out of our time,” writes English author Olivia Laing. Whether a small piece of ground or an endless lawn dotted with flowers and ornamental species, a garden is never just a scene of soothing beauty. It is also a lens that refracts social, environmental, and political transformations. Gardens have long been a terrain of sovereignty and privilege—from the colonial-era trend of plant-hunting, whereby “exotic” species were systematically collected and imported from colonised regions to create picturesque European landscapes, to the role of slavery in shaping and maintaining these places of beauty. These events gave rise to the eighteenth-century English garden, the spread of new plant species, and a deeper understanding of their properties; however, they also led to the depletion of local ecosystems and the dispossession of land from local populations. Even today, the misdistribution of urban land, where the luxury of green space remains the preserve of a few, bears witness to this enduring inequity. And yet, if the garden is a stage upon which power reveals itself, it is also a ground of rebellion and shared dreams. With its generative force, the garden opens into various spaces: a place for reverie and repose, where time loosens its grip, and we are invited to surrender to the present, to sense the rhythm of other living beings.

If the garden is both a place of power and rêverie, artist Marta Niedbał embraces this duality. According to Niedbał, a cultivated landscape is not only a site of pleasure but also a terrain of rot and decay, conflict, and resistance. In her practice—which combines sculpture, drawing, tapestry, along with research in dance and the use of voice—she observes the life cycles of bodies and plants: their porous edges, the ways they interconnect, shift, and reemerge in unexpected forms.

Her tapestries, realised in Poland—where the artist is from and currently lives—contain abstract shapes that allude to flower bulbs, climbing plants, and large petals. Holes in the fabric interrupt the lines, offering a moment of pause—an interlude—while everything else is in motion. Other sculptures bear infinity signs, hinting at ways of perceiving time beyond linear measurement. Made of burned wood, these tablets reference alchemical practices of transforming matter through fire. A series of drawings realised using menstrual blood emphasise the cyclical nature of bodies and non-linear transformation. In Gardenesque, all the pieces are interconnected, cross-pollinating with one another. Figures and environments interweave, shapeshift, and transform, caught in a tension between fluidity and careful control.

In times of ongoing violence and instability, when people are reduced to a bare existence, alive but almost devoid of meaning, Marta Niedbał focuses on what is closest to her: the garden and its materials, but also the human body, something vulnerable yet a source of power and liberation. Her work invites us to reconnect with our desires and dreams, to notice the wild or tamed nature that keeps us alive. Using household fabrics, vivid and muted colours, porous surfaces, and abstract forms, her practice cultivates a sensual intelligence, an embodied understanding of materials. The work asks us not only to look at it, but to feel it with our entire body.

Like a vibrant garden where life and death continually intertwine, Niedbał's work reveals echoes of other worlds — if only we take the time to listen.

– Giulia Civardi

The exhibition was organized with the support of Consulate General of The Republic of Poland in Milan.