Exhibitions
Siân Davey – The Garden
Friday 1 August – Saturday 30 August 2025
Preview event: Thursday 31 July, 6-8pm
We are excited to present Siân Davey – The Garden as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2025.
“There are no secrets in this house.
Where there’s a secret, she says, there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.“
– Claire Keegan
Siân Davey and her son, Luke, spent three years transforming her garden into an immersive wildflower haven. Their garden wall became a community space for shared stories. Inviting others in, they captured moments of reflection, love and connection. Thus, The Garden was born; a place for heartbreak, joy and everything in between, an expression of sexuality, yearning, joy and interconnectedness. The Garden is a pilgrimage, an intentional act to cultivate a garden that is grounded in love: a reverential offering to humanity.
The Garden is supported by Creative Scotland.
About Siân Davey
Siân Davey is a photographer and founder of The Creative Body Process. She has a background in fine art and social policy and worked for fifteen years as a Humanist Psychotherapist. In 2007, following a visit to the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at Tate Modern, London, she was inspired to translate her personal history into a creative practice. In 2011, she moved into photography, drawing upon her history to inform her practice. In 2014, Davey completed an MA in Photography at the University of Plymouth, followed by an MFA in 2016.
Her awards include the Arnold Newman Award for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, New York (2016), the Prix Virginia, Paris (2016) and the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal (2017) and Honorary Fellowship (2023). Her work was selected in three consecutive years (2015 – 2017) for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She has been a recipient of a W. Eugene Smith Fellowship (2019), commissioned by the Wellcome Photography Prize (2019) and been a nominee for the Prix Elysée (2023 and more recently the Prix Pictet.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group shows, including at Aperture, New York (2018); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2021); Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2021); and Images Vevey, Switzerland (2022). She is represented by Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and has been included in numerous exhibitions and art fairs with the gallery.
Davey’s work is held by various collections including the Science Museum, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Bristol and the National Portrait Gallery London, the Centre national des arts Plastiques, Paris; and the Martin Parr Foundation.
The Garden is Siân’s third book with Trolley Books following Looking for Alice (2015) and Martha (2018). Looking For Alice was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Awards (2016) and for the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards (2017).
Images: L:R
The Garden V, Copyright Siân Davey, Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.
The Garden XII, Copyright Siân Davey, Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.
