Gardens: Fragments of Life and Loss

This research-led project, Fragments: Life and Loss, explores the intersection of art, memory, and ecological change through a sustained engagement with gardens as dynamic living systems. Through the medium of painting, Leo Robba investigates how the garden can function simultaneously as a personal and cultural archive—embodying histories of loss, processes of adaptation, and the persistent presence of regeneration. The project contributes to contemporary discourses in visual art, environmental humanities, and memory studies by translating observational fieldwork into visual forms that communicate experiential and ecological knowledge.

The central aim of Fragments: Life and Loss is to develop a visual language that captures the transient nature of memory and environment. Specifically, the research:
• Examines how gardens act as metaphors for personal and collective loss, memory, and resilience.
• Utilises painting as a method of observational enquiry to document cycles of change in natural environments.
• Reflects on how the act of looking and painting can mediate grief and foster a sense of continuity in the face of transformation.
• Engages with site-specific experiences to build a visual archive of temporal and seasonal shifts within garden spaces.

Robba’s methodological approach is grounded in systematic observation and repetitive return to specific garden sites, allowing for a longitudinal engagement with ecological and emotional change. The process includes:
• On-site field studies and visual documentation through sketches and photographs.
• Studio-based painting practices that reinterpret fieldwork into abstract and semi-representational forms.
• The integration of personal narratives, botanical symbolism, and material experimentation to evoke the layered nature of memory and landscape.
• Engagement with relevant theoretical frameworks from environmental aesthetics, phenomenology, and memory studies.

This project makes a contribution to communicable knowledge by demonstrating how visual art can serve as both a reflective and analytical tool for understanding the human condition in relation to ecological systems. Fragments: Life and Loss extends beyond aesthetic representation, positioning painting as a mode of enquiry that captures emotional, historical, and environmental processes in flux. The work invites viewers to consider how the seemingly ordinary garden becomes a profound site of remembrance, transformation, and resilience in the face of personal and planetary change.