How could you make a memorial for a garden? And how might a garden be a portrait of someone’s life story? Simryn Gill’s installation Maria’s Garden (2021) is an index of an urban oasis: precise yet poignant records from 93 one-to-one impressions of the plants that inhabited her neighbor’s property. The eponymous Maria was an Italian immigrant to Sydney and a widow. After Maria’s death but before developers could demolish her paradise, Gill made an extensive six-month study of every plant—and many of the weeds—in the adjacent plot in the suburb of Marrickville. As the artist looked closely at the rows of trees and plants, she recorded an entire Mediterranean garden—from lemon trees to persimmons, grape vines to prickly pears, hydrangeas to succulents—whose inhabitants, like their caretaker, were non-native to Australia, and perhaps embodied a piece of home or the idea of one’s origins.

• Australia
• Singapore