Launch: Is This A Garden? and The Perfect Flower

How do gardens shape the people around them? How do social conditions, histories and environments shape the gardens? Open Eye Gallery is delighted to announce two new exhibitions as part of LOOK Photo Biennial 2026: Is This a Garden? and The Perfect Flower.

Is this a Garden? (Gallery 1 and 2) is curated by Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps. For this exhibition, they’ve been looking at the gardens as the backdrop to everyday life. Yan Wang Preston’s The Perfect Flower project (Gallery 3) charts the development of hydrangeas in the UK, exploring what a perfect flower is and the journey to get it.

Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps, curators, said: “What interested us was not photographs of gardens so much as photographs where gardens are present in the background of everyday life. Bringing these works together has allowed us to think about gardens as social spaces shaped by history, class, labour, and personal experience, and we hope audiences find new ways of looking at these often-overlooked environments.”

The Perfect Flower is part of The OFFSHOOT Artist in Residence programme, which is a collaboration between University of Salford Art Collection, RHS Garden Bridgewater and Open Eye Gallery, generously supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Is this a Garden? is developed in partnership with The centre for research in Art, Architecture & Design at Birmingham City University.

We will also be celebrating our latest Atrium exhibition: Our Freedom Then and Now, a vibrant national photography exhibition bringing together images from 60 locally led projects, marking 80 years since the end of the Second World War. This exhibition features work from communities across the UK, exploring what freedom meant in these communities in 1945 and how those ideas resonate today. These 60 projects form a powerful nationwide portrait of people, place and belonging. Developed by Future Arts Centres and Open Eye Gallery, the exhibition forms part of the wider Our Freedom: Then and Now programme. In total, 22 photographers collaborated with communities of all ages and backgrounds, inviting them to reflect on their own histories, experiences and identities.