Uncertain Terrain: The Garden

The use of alternative photographic practices to address ecological concerns in Liggins’s first REF submission, Barcode Wales, are also present here. Uncertain Terrain: The Garden was a series of thirty-eight large-scale photographic prints that explored alternative ways of engaging with garden space to engender a greater sense of involvement. The spectator–spectacle view and the aesthetics of the picturesque were rejected on the grounds that they perpetuate the concept of a world ‘out there’, set against but nonetheless ordered by the human subject. Instead, Liggins used lightweight cameras with plastic, low resolution lenses so that the production of maximum detail would be prevented, and the formality of the image would be lost. This was another articulation of Liggins’s baroque photographic aesthetic: rather than description, there was openness to whatever kind of image might be produced when the disruption, opacity and disorder introduced by the plastic lenses worked with qualities from the gardens. The property of ‘working with’ is key here, since it redefines the photograph from being a window on the world to a surface that reveals the intersection of technology and location. The works were exhibited at the Jaipur Arts Centre, Jaipur, 2013, with co-exhibitor Sarah Tierney, and as a solo show at The Gallery, British Council, New Delhi. A feature article in Culture Colony Quarterly, volume 1, highlighted Liggins’s interest in the capacity of photography to resist its ‘window on the world’ status. Preparatory research was exhibited as part of Unreliable Truths, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, with an accompanying catalogue, and reviewed in Source journal, issue 57, winter 2008. The project’s methodology was discussed in Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, edited by Liz Wells (IB Tauris, 2011). Financial support was provided by the Government of Rajasthan and the British Council, New Delhi