Image by Eliott Gamer

AVANT GARDENER brings together local and international artists to explore how creative practices cultivate new forms of connection, care, and resistance. At the intersection of art, activism, and sustainability, the exhibition considers how meaning and pleasure might still be found in our relationships with the living world.

Across media including comics, illustration, moving image, installation, photography, and sculpture, the works move between lush landscapes and speculative, post-apocalyptic terrains. They examine how human bodies and experiences are shaped by their environments, simultaneously embedded within and estranged from them. Drawing on pop culture, myth, and cinematic language, the exhibition invites renewed attention to the spaces we inhabit and transform.

In a time of climate anxiety and ecological awareness, gardens and landscapes emerge as complex sites of refuge and control, intimacy and exclusion. Artists highlight overlooked ecologies, from fragile habitats to hidden urban systems, foregrounding interdependence across forms of life.

Positioning the environment as an active, responsive presence, AVANT GARDENER offers playful and critical perspectives on belonging and responsibility. It suggests that creative practice can open new ways of imagining, inhabiting, and caring for shared futures.

It reflects the Naughton Gallery’s commitment to presenting ambitious work engaging urgent social and environmental questions today.

Open daily, 11am–4pm. Free admission.