THE GARDENER’S BAR
Tamara Henderson
11 July - 29 August 2026
Exhibition Opening: Friday 10 July 2026, 6pm
Artist Talk: Date TBC
“She remains in a state of intoxication. At the center of the intoxication is the greenhouse. (That drug which we take in solitude: ourselves.) The greenhouse is not a building of glass and soil and plants, but a dwelling of the soul, a Strange Inn; a refuge where consciousness pauses in its journey.”
— Erik Lavesson, from Gardener’s Bar Codex
In her first Canberra exhibition, Tamara Henderson (b. Tantramar, Canada, 1982) brings to the city she now calls home The Gardener’s Bar — a work about the patient, unfolding art of coming home to oneself.
Since arriving in Australia just ahead of the pandemic, Henderson has given herself and her practice to the soil of this place, to be remade. Transitioning from a practice shaped by European city-hopping into one now anchored in a house with a garden in the ‘bush capital’, she turned to compost as method and meditation: a way of digesting the character of a new environment, and her own place within it.
She nursed four large bins of food waste as they transformed into something like the elixir of life — tending them diligently, bringing them into the warmth of the garden shed, costuming them, and unearthing from each a distinct character: The Gardener, The Director, Light (the Sunspider), and Sound (Country Worm/City Worm). Each one honoured a key aspect of her practice and became a personage in their own right, collaborating to produce sculpture, painting, sound design, and film for her solo show Green in the Grooves (Camden Arts Centre, London, 2023).
The Gardener was one among that family, the most rooted in place, in soil, in the labour of belonging. The Gardener’s Bar was first built in London as an ode to that backyard Canberra shed and the warm charge of Henderson’s new life. A rusted structure holding the residues, inspirations, and iterations behind the finished work, standing in quiet contrast to the rooms around it, in the city she used to call home.
Three years on, the four characters have continued to grow and change, and The Gardener’s Bar stands anew. No longer a protective cloche for fermenting life, nor a frame for the mark-making that records a life being lived; The Gardener’s bar is a dream. It stands now as a thing in itself: light-filled, filtering life, surrounded by and at one with a vibrant garden.
The Gardener’s Bar will be accompanied by the Gardener’s Bar Codex, a collection of texts reflecting on and inhabiting different aspects of Henderson’s practice, written by close friends and collaborators of the artist from the past two decades. Texts by Erik Lavesson, Kasper Feyrer, Johannah Fahey, Luke Milne, Tiziana La Melia, Julia Dunne, Jennifer Higgie.
— Julia Dunne
In partnership with Canberra Glassworks. Supported by Creative Australia through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy.
Image: courtesy the artist.