“Garden Day”, takes its inspiration from the story of Beatrice, the female charachter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” who was locked in a garden, and the women who appear in photos taken in a garden on a family album. In the book, the life of Rapaccini’s daughter Beatrice, who lives in the garden created by her scientist father, is destroyed by the influence of two other male characters who hold the rights to rationality, science and experimentation. For Beatrice, nature is a man-made garden; for the women who appear in the gardens, it is the nature that they identify with with all its liveliness and willpower. At the intersection of these two stories, the project focuses on women and non-human creatures standing at the border of nature and culture. “Garden Day” is visualized with the pictures of women appearing in the garden, collected from different cities of Turkey. 

The project continues through an archive of photographs of women and artificial roses taken in photography studios in the late 1980s and early 1990s, collected from different cities across Turkey. Hatice from Mersin, Bahar, Nilgün, Nurten from Giresun, Rahime from Kars, Rahime from Kars, Müzeyyen from Kayseri, all of whom reduce the manufactured nature to an artificial rose.

This project is being produced during the Spring 2023 semester of Daire Sanat’s Open Studio Artist Program.