Zen Gardener

Peter Finnemore describes his artistic practice as involving ‘a form of internal gardening, a cultivation of the dark damp soil of the imagination’. In Zen Gardener this psychological process has as its physical stage the garden of the artist’s family home in the Gwendraeth Valley. The correspondence between the two is hardly straightforward, however. An extraordinary alchemy of idea and intuition, of actual and symbolic, is called into play and an elusive interweaving of spiritual, psychological, material and cultural allusions takes place. Images follow in which the surreal, often inexplicable nature of what is seen being performed in the garden seems at odds with the mundane and earthy realities of its beans and its bonfires, its sunflowers and its sheds. Idiosyncratic, humorous, dark, they are the vision and voice of one of the most individual and profoundly interesting artists working in Wales today.