Ben Sanderson
I’m a visual artist with a studio at CAST, in Helston, Cornwall. My works develop slowly, attuned to the seasons, embracing cyclical processes of growth & decay. I work in painting, drawing & textiles, often returning to, and transforming work. Monotypes on paper are echoed in printed elements appearing on canvas; canvas is sewn & patched back together, or mulched to become rag paper, becoming a ground for new painting.
In 2021 I had my first solo show at Kestle Barton, Cornwall. The exhibition grew from three years visiting Trebah Gardens on the Helford River. During this time, I organised garden walks with specialists (an ethnobotanical researcher, gardeners, a psychiatrist, a herbalist, artists & poets) to discuss the space between people and plants. These conversations informed my work and have left me questioning what happens at the garden’s edge.
When watching the garden, it often became a metaphor for society. A well-kept edge, a ditch, weeds, a wildflower, the potted, the garden flower. Since my time at Trebah, I have become fascinated by the ways that rogue, uncultivated, uninvited species meet and mix with the carefully selected ones. Systems of power and oppression are echoed in the garden; naming, categorising, cultivating, displacing, collecting, weeding. The flowers in the work aren’t meant to be garden flowers, they are the ones that live in the cracks of the pavement and that are crawling up the walls.
