The Art World's Next Renaissance

Upon first glance, there is little similarity between the artwork of Theresa Bear and Brenna K. Murphy. Firstly is the difference of medium. Theresa is a photographer and botanical artist, creating poised and meticulous scenes depicting the beauty of nature. Brenna’s work is hand-embroidered, an accumulation of thousands of tiny stitches. Theresa currently lives in Portland, Oregon, Brenna in East Germany. Theresa is radiant and passionate, Brenna in possession of a stillness that evokes a quiet wisdom. 

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Even with very different final products, both artists find solace and inspiration in their depictions of the natural world. Both were selected by Bond & Grace to create work for The Secret Garden Art Novel, not despite their differences, but because of them.

We sat down with Theresa and Brenna to discuss their practice, what inspired them about Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel, and progress and inclusion in the art world.

Both Artists see their work as a way of processing and interpreting the world around them. “When I make art, it’s my way of trying to understand the world and process my emotions,” Theresa says.

Brenna remarks something similar, saying “For me, the purpose of art is to process and interpret the human experience. That’s what artists do.” For both, the term process is important. But how does the act of processing play out in each of their practices?

For Theresa, this metaphor was particularly powerful. “What I loved about the book was the theme of nature being medicine, but also friendship and how the garden is healing. [The children] being together is so restorative you can see the garden grow as their friendship grows,” she says.

This linear trajectory from grief to recovery, sickness to health, while a satisfying narrative structure, is not always true to life. This was something Brenna intentionally focused on in her response to the text. “Part of my work was responding to the way [Frances Hodgson Burnett] wraps things up and by magic everyone is better,” Brenna says.

“It’s not like you flip a switch and magically it’s over. Everyone is working really hard, they are doing the labor of grief, the labor of depression, the labor of self-introspection. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do the really laborious process of embroidery and stitching. It takes time; you’re bent over and your shoulders hurt and your hands hurt. Grief is work. That was my major critique of the book and something I was lovingly trying to put in my pieces.”

Another theme present in both the book and the work of the Artists is the hyper-specificity of place. Much of the plot of The Secret Garden is reliant on the environment in which it occurs. Misselthwaite Manor and the Moor serve as a character with as much impact and agency as Mary, Dickon, and Colin. Similarly, Theresa sees her home in Portland, Oregon and the environment of the Pacific Northwest as being fundamental to her work. “When I go out in nature, I find all the answers I need,” she says “The Pacific Northwest has so much accessibility to nature, which unfortunately we don’t have everywhere in the world anymore. I’m thirty minutes from a waterfall, I’m a little over an hour from the beach, I can go to a desert, I can go to a mountain, it’s a 20 minute drive to a forest. That kind of access for me and my family is what makes me really rich and inspires my art.”

Brenna also sees place as a deciding factor in her art, but in a different way. Rather than a connection to a specific location, she sees placelessness influencing her work. “For me personally, my art has always come from my own lived experience, particularly having this nomadic upbringing where I moved around every few years from the time I was born until the time I moved to Philly after my undergraduate college years. I didn’t have that childhood home in the same house. I had none of that,” she says. “My studio is in boxes, so I am always working from this internal space that stays with me wherever I am on a map.”

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With a single thread and the flash of a camera, Brenna and Theresa’s work helps us interpret a much-beloved story in new ways, and in doing so we become agents for progress; nurturing our own gardens both large and small.

Listen to our full conversation with Brenna K. Murphy and Theresa Bear here

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