How does your garden grow?

Women sculptors in a space of their own

By Margie MacKinnon

Originally published in

RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine

Autumn/Winter 2025 - Issue 8

 Its All Kicking Off Lucy Gregory, ph. Nick Turpin. MARY MARY at theCOLAB/The Artist’s Garden, Temple, London

As you exit the Temple tube station, take a few quick turns to the left, then go up a short flight of stairs. You will find yourself in a public space which occupies a prime location in the City of London, overlooking the River Thames. It affords sweeping views, from the Houses of Parliament, past the Hayward Gallery and the South Bank, all the way down to the Shard. Its name, The Artist’s Garden, conjures up images of leafy trees and fragrant herbaceous borders in the best tradition of English horticulture. But this is a garden without flowers, and it owes its existence to a phenomenon called the Great Stink. In the summer of 1858, the stench of untreated human waste from an outdated sewer system that emptied directly into the Thames had reached a crisis point, following several outbreaks of cholera. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette proposed a new sewage system which would be enclosed in a series of embankments along the river, including the Victoria Embankment, the site upon which The Artist’s Garden sits. Restoration Conversations spoke with its Director, Claire Mander, to discover the background to this unique open-air exhibition space for public sculpture by women.

Auguries Through the Mist, C Powell Williams, MARY MARY at theCOLAB/The Artist’s Garden

Temple, London, ph. Nick Turpin

Restoration Conversations: How did The Artist’s Garden come about? Was the space derelict before you took over?

Claire Mander: After Bazalgette’s embankment came to fruition, it hadn’t really had a purpose. I think it was always open as a viewing point, and we have photographs of the benches, which we’ve just restored, being lined up along the river frontage for spectators to watch a procession going past on the embankment. But when I was asking to use this space, it was full of rough sleepers; it was quite frightening and dirty. The Artist’s Garden came into being in 2021, after four years of negotiating with Westminster Council and the landowners around the site to see whether we could set up a sculpture garden for women artists, which did not exist anywhere in the world – apart from, for example, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, which is a permanent exhibition of a solo artist.

RC: Your current exhibition is called MARY, MARY. What is the thinking behind that title and the exhibition?

CM: MARY, MARY is an exhibition of nine women artists which positively reframes the characterisation of women as ‘contrary’, as exemplified by the nursery rhyme which inspired its title, Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow …? It is a reclamation of public space by women who subvert and reimagine the traditional elements of garden design.

RC: Your previous exhibitions focused on large scale commissions of a single artist. Why the switch to a group show?

CM: We wanted to give women more visibility, more quickly. And we wanted to test the appetite for borrowing work from galleries, borrowing existing work from artists, and making new commissions or reconfiguring work. The curatorial challenge was that women’s work is not ‘group’ work. They are all making work in extraordinarily different ways. I think the works here definitely communicate with each other, but they are creating a wonderful cacophony, which shows the huge energy that exists in the work of contemporary sculptors. One of the works we commissioned is an enormous fountain made by Candida Powell-Williams called Auguries Through the Mist (2024). It is our first fountain and was no easy task, given that we have no power and no running water at this site. But those were obstacles we managed to overcome.

RC: There are so many elements to this work, but what is particularly striking is the precariousness of the structure, which is contrary to classical fountain architecture.

CM: Yes, it teeters around expectations of what a fountain should be. It does not triumphantly spurt; it drips, recalling the description [in the biblical Song of Songs] of the Virgin Mary as ‘a garden enclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed’.

RC: What is the connection between the two parts of Alice Wilson’s work, Savoy (2024)?

SAVOY  by A. Wilson, ph. Nick Turpin. MARY MARY at theCOLAB/The Artist’s Garden, Temple, London

CM: Part of the work involves her covering the entire Artist’s Hut [an existing structure used by resident artists] in a black and white photographic image of the Scottish pine forest where, for two weeks each year, she walks and sleeps outside to gain inspiration for the work she will make the following year. The second part, standing next to the hut, is a dense vertical forest of brightly coloured construction timbers with schematic outlines of dwellings at their tips. She’s interested in displacing the hierarchies of wood, and places as much importance on the romantic image of the pine forest as on the two-by-four builders’ timber. The work is called Savoy, because she was passing by the Savoy Hotel every day on her way to the Artist’s Hut and because, subconsciously, she knew that Savoy means pine forest.

RC: Virginia Overton’s piece, Untitled (Chime for Caro) (2022), references the English abstract sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. What’s the story there?

CM: This is an interactive sculpture constructed from offcuts of steel belonging to Caro that he deposited at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park for use by future generations of sculptors. Virginia chose the pieces of steel that she wanted and used them to make a massive wind chime. She cut pieces of aluminium tubing which are the same weight as each of the steel pieces, allowing them to balance on the structure. The heaviness of the structure contrasts with the lightness of the sound created when the wind blows through the chimes or visitors activate them. It is a dematerialisation of sculpture into sound.

RC: Superhero Cog Woman (2019-24) by LR Vandy sounds like a contradiction in terms. Is she saying that women’s powers are both superhuman and mundane?

CM: Vandy believes that women are the most essential ‘cogs’ in society, who may be invisible, but they keep the societal machine running. She is celebrating all women and the work of all women. The sculpture is placed in a corner, within sight of Waterloo Bridge. It became known as the ‘Ladies Bridge’ when its construction had to be undertaken by women welders due to labour shortages caused by World War II. Despite initial scepticism, the women just got to it and made the bridge.

RC: Visitors to the garden could easily miss Holly Stevenson’s Another Mother (2022) which is hiding in plain sight as part of the balustrade surrounding the space. Who is the mother of the title?

CM: She is a nod to all Marys of whom Maria, the wife of Joseph Bazalgette, is one. While the great engineer is one of the 1,500 men who have a commemorative statue in London, she is not one of the only 50 named women to be so honoured. Each of Maria’s eleven children is represented by a flower on the sculpture, which is a quiet shrine to the untold but essential support roles of women across the world and throughout history.

RC: What can you tell us about theCOLAB, the women-led organisation behind The Artist’s Garden?

CM: theCOLAB is a charity committed to advancing the practice and appreciation of the work of female artists innovating in the field of sculpture. It started in 2011 with a project called Sculpture Shock, which was a series of site-specific interventions in very unusual sites in London, accompanied by a 3-month studio, and a modest production fee, so, not a huge amount, but a place to make the work and a site to make it for. That developed into a very successful series of commissions.

RC: What were the sites you and the artists chose?

CM: We had a boat on the canals. We had the tunnels under Waterloo Station. We had historic buildings; for example, there’s an amphitheatre in Chiswick House that had never been opened to the public before. Hanna Haaslahti created an installation there in the pond that sits in front of the Ionic Temple. The idea is to bring together people, land and art by facilitating artists’ responses to places beyond the white cube and always for the public.

RC: You also have an educational outreach programme for young people. What does that involve?

CM: We have a partnership with City Lions, which includes children aged 13-16 years old (often perceived as a difficult age) from all over Westminster including its pupil referral units i.e., those excluded from the school system. They come to The Artist’s Garden during the holidays, meet and talk to me or Alice Walters, our Deputy Director, about careers in the creative industries and then participate in an artist-led workshop which relates to the work that the artist is showing. They get to spend up to three hours with a woman artist – a very rewarding experience both for the participants and for the artists. As well as giving them a glimpse into a career trajectory they perhaps had not considered, it gives everyone a reason to believe in the power of women artists and women in general to make things happen.

MARY, MARY also features the work of artists Rong Bao, Olivia Bax, Lucy Gregory and Frances Richardson. The exhibition continues until Spring 2026.

MARGIE MACKINNON