At the core of “The Gardener is Absent” lies an exploration of confinement, seen through the practice of gardening. Natural shapes and limits become increasingly bound to human whims and processes than nature itself. Greenery has been used as a purely aesthetic tool throughout human history. Today, having largely displaced nature and drawn by their own ideas of order and control, humans are creating more and more containers to place nature, making the garden a site of brittle negotiation.

 Through sculpture, photography, and painting, I shape a hybrid language that conveys the puzzling feel of the new natural landscape, where boundaries alternate between blurry and sharp. Inspired by the idea of grafting, as a gesture of imperfection, an acknowledgment that life emerges when different and disparate forms come into contact, I extend this into design as a contemporary metaphor for adaptability and resilience.