Borrowed Landscape

My project Borrowed Landscape (2021-2024) is an exploration of growth and stagnation, loss and gain, loneliness and community. I started this project as a way to work through the turmoil of the pandemic, and as a way to feel connected to my community and the wider world during a time of intense isolation. Inspired by the concept of “borrowed scenery,” a gardening philosophy that incorporates the surrounding landscape into the design of a private garden, this project explores ways to bring the outside world closer to home.

I think a lot about the history and culture surrounding gardens, both public and private, and I think of them as a critically important type of space within the domesticated landscapes of towns and cities. My work reveals ways in which we treat the landscape: how does what we do to the landscape bring us together or keep us apart? How do we use space? What do we expect the landscape to give us or do for us, and what do we do to the land in return? I seek to offer answers to these questions with my work. The site of my inquiry is the garden. A garden is like an estuary: it’s where the private stream of home life meets the powerful, pulling tide of all that is out-of-doors.

In 2020 my garden became my only creative outlet, and a source of peace and strength amidst the crushing uncertainty of the pandemic. I had lost my job in the art world and felt totally disconnected from photography. Working – and making my own work – was how I had always found my way through the world. Photography was my guide and a mode of exploration, but it didn’t feel available to me at the beginning of the pandemic. Feeling a dearth of change and growth in my own life, I set my camera aside and focused instead on the quick lives of my plants. Growth, abundance, decline, death – caring for my plants was a way to care for myself.

A desire to examine simultaneous feelings of grief and gratitude was a way back to photography. I created portraits and still lifes of the plants themselves, photographed the landscape of the garden, and experimented with making collaborative, situational portraits with my neighbors who share the space. Over the years some neighbors have moved away and new neighbors have moved in. The seasons change and plants die back, then re-emerge. For all the care we take, and for all the ownership we may feel over our private spaces, we are just borrowing small pieces of the landscape until it is time to move on.

Paloma Dooley is part of Issue 17 by Guest Editor Torbjørn Rødland.