Sarah Price
This was not the garden we had arrived to photograph. At Chelsea, attention often begins with one subject and is quietly pulled towards another. Sarah Price's garden sat beside Jihae Hwang's, close enough to be seen in passing, but with a presence that stayed longer than expected.
The photographs were made from the edge of the garden rather than from within a formal commission. That distance matters. It gives the study its shape: not a complete record, but an encounter with planting, stone, vessels, water, shadow and the atmosphere of a space glimpsed in fragments.
The garden seemed to hold two times at once. There was the constructed reality of Chelsea, temporary and precise, and beneath it something older: the weight of stone, the warmth of terracotta, the vertical presence of trees, the softness of planting allowed to gather around hard surfaces.
Nothing felt decorative in isolation. Each object seemed to belong to a wider rhythm of restraint. The vessels, the table, the trunks, the muted planting and the small points of yellow all worked quietly together, building a place that felt settled even within the movement of the show.
What stayed was not spectacle, but quietness. The garden did not need to announce itself. Its strength came through texture, proportion and the way light moved across surfaces. Even seen from the edge, there was a feeling of pause.
The photographs hold onto that pause. A tree becoming a column. A vessel catching the last of the light. Irises opening beside darker planting. Stone and water forming a low horizon. The garden became less something to look at directly and more something that altered the pace around it.
Only later, returning to the archive, did the work begin to feel complete enough to stand on its own. The study became less about access and more about attention: the moment when a neighbouring garden, seen almost by accident, becomes part of the way a place is remembered.
For mkd STUDIO, this is often where the work begins. Not with the most obvious subject, but with the detail that remains after the event has passed. Sarah Price's garden stayed in that way, quietly present in the archive until it revealed itself as its own study.
