Previous exhibition

Blissful Garden Concept

1 Acorn Parade
London SE15 2TZ

Works on paper

27–29 March 2025

Alice Hartley
Astrid Kajsa Nylander
Dwayne Coleman
Jaana–Kristiina Alakoski
Neil Raitt
Tommy Sveningsson Krek

In this economy, who can afford such luxuries as sticks and stones and the gentle drip-drip-drip of raindrops on a lily pad in a pond? Beneath the midnight sun, blue light is piercing sleepless eyes, the sky is always the colour of your screen.¹

FRONDA is pleased to present Blissful Garden Concept,² bringing together six Stockholm and South East London based artists in a group show exploring nature’s elusive position as a place we fundamentally belong to, but are increasingly estranged from. Drawing on both lived experiences and the horizons of imagination, here, speculative landscapes may act as portals to mythologies and our collective unconsciousness,³ or test the limits of what we perceive as real.

Scientific studies show that feeling connected to nature can decrease depression and increase the notion that life is worth living, but—luckily—that this ‘connectedness’ has little to nothing to do with physicality. To see an abundant meadow in your mind’s eye and to willingly wade through it, inhaling the the intoxicating perfume of wildflowers as you gently brush past them, in a sort of post-earth lucid daydream, or to verbally gush over the gritty wildness of the untamed swamps of your memory, much like Thoreau: the ultimate, uninhibited, wetland fan boy,⁴ has proven just as effective as physically travelling out of the city and into the actual sticks.⁵

In a time of ‘nature-deficit disorder’ and ‘plant blindness’, what native species might your mind conjure up, with or without knowing how to name them; foxgloves, hogweed, daisies, poppies perhaps, whilst filling the gaps with pure abstraction, fleeting shapes and colours like an impressionist dreamscape. If seeing is believing then you may have your meadows, swamps and ponds, and your 8 Hour High Quality Stereo Ocean Sounds Of Rolling Waves For Deep Sleep, too. Everything is possible, rosebud, this is your blissful garden after all, and green things are flowers too.⁶

@->->-

1 —— A nod to the opening line in Neuromancer, the 1984 sci-fi novel by William Gibson: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.“

2 —— The title is a reference to the concept of a primordial garden, like Eden, found in many ancient religions and mythologies.

3 —— The Jungian idea of a common, inherited part of the unconscious mind that contains universal, ancient images and ideas (archetypes) common to all humans.

4 —— In Walking, the transcendental essay exploring the relationship between civilsed society and the natural world from 1862, Henry David Thoreau likened the swamp to a sanctum sanctorum, the holiest of the holy.

5 —— It’s true!

6 —— From the Frank O’Hara poem ‘Poem’, published in Poetry (May 1977) <3

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