AVANT GARDENER

16.04.26 - 31.05.26

Tara Booth / Laura Callaghan / Adham Faramawy / Eliott Gamer / Sam Fred Hinton / Laura Kelly / Aidan Koch / Patrick Kyle / Luís Lázaro Matos / Sinead O’Neill-Nicholl / Stuart Sandford / Sabīne Šnē / Oisín Tozer / Yūji Yokoyama

AVANT GARDENER examines how contemporary artists are tending to new growth – cultivating visions of connection, care, and resistance. Bringing together local and international practitioners, the exhibition explores the intersections of art, activism, and sustainability, asking how we continue to find meaning, pleasure, and purpose in our relationship with the living world.

From lush landscapes to post-apocalyptic dreamscapes, the works consider how the human body and experience are shaped by their surroundings – at once embedded within them and set apart. Through pop cultural references, mythological allusions, and cinematic echoes, the exhibition invites us to look anew at the environments we inhabit, shape, and sometimes destroy.

In an age defined by climate anxiety and ecological awakening, gardens, parks, and landscapes emerge as terrains of care and control, conflict and connection. These spaces can be sites of refuge and tension, intimacy and exclusion, growth and erasure, where questions of belonging, identity, and responsibility come into focus. Spanning comics, illustration, moving image, installation, photography, and sculpture, the works ask what it means to belong – and who or what is allowed to thrive.

Rather than a passive backdrop, the environment appears here as a dynamic, responsive presence that reflects our fears, fantasies, and vulnerabilities. The exhibition moves between the personal and the speculative, the playful and the profound, offering multiple ways of seeing and understanding our place within these entangled systems.

Many of the artists draw attention to what is often overlooked: fragile habitats, invasive species, hidden urban ecologies, and the complex worlds beneath our feet. Shifting perspective from the microscopic to the monumental, the exhibition foregrounds interconnection across all forms of life. It suggests that creativity – through art, world-building, storytelling, publishing, and play – can help us think differently about the future, encouraging new ways of living with and caring for the natural world.

AVANT GARDENER forms part of REACH 26, Queen’s University Belfast’s annual Arts and Sustainability Festival, and continues the Naughton Gallery’s commitment to presenting bold, thought-provoking work that speaks to the world we share.

Image: Eliott Gamer