Stars scratched into the night sky shine all the same.

When I was young, my mum would push me up the hill to nursery. She walked fast, slicing through the northern drizzle showering over our deep-seated suburbia. Each rectangular front garden we passed was a space to show off, to flourish, to state an intention. I remember feeling like it was a drive-by show, snatching moments of escape in the space between our house (a space dominated by rules that weren’t mine) and primary school, (a place complicated with rules, also not mine). Constructing a garden is constructing a sense of self, making ornaments of nature. It all shone when the rain hit it, bouncing off the petals like drops of glitter confetti at the end of a boy band’s concert. Elaborately shaped planting beds and scalloped lawn edges would be stuffed with tulips, pansies, bedding plants (a catch-all name), kaleidoscopic as if snatched from the wardrobe of a cabaret performer on a cruise ship. The centrepieces were often roses, whose petals me and my friends would cross the threshold of the grass to steal and put in a jar with water, fermenting the mixture into a gross sludge that we called perfume. Around the edges grew conifers, which as an early teen I would pull the fronds from, rubbing them between my fingers to hide the smell of cigarette smoke after tumbling about with boys in a field nearby.

It now seems against the idea of nature to control it in this way – for our folly, jewellery for our lawns; but it does, at least, become a portal to a truer camp reality, a space which many observe but would never fully occupy because of internal prejudice. On our street, someone had made their flower beds into the shape of a cartoon sailboat; another had rather shoddily tried to shape the conifers into a duck using a chainsaw. Other more invasive plants had started to push their way through the holes in the conifers, so the duck had all sorts of wacky protrusions. Still, both held their glamour with certainty. It is absurd when you think about it, completely outrageous, but also deeply relatable. The space to parade a little bit of flair, on a land of one’s own.

Andrew Sim’s work takes us on this journey, where a cast of characters – some natural, some magical – are set against the void of an eternal night spotted with stars. The edges of one canvas are tickled by the long sleek leaves of a dracaena sprouting from a central root, each spindly branch exploding at the top, thrilled with personality. Elsewhere, an echium is nestled under a bulky rainbow taking joyous shelter, whilst over another large canvas, a monkey puzzle tree is circled with a garland of baby pink tulips. Sim gives us a soft spectacle, a place to put potentials while the nighttime protects the edges. A looser, off-duty time for the natural world, where Sim’s characters are robust, confident, bouncy and flushed.

The yucca, with leaves like fireworks, becomes a group of friends dancing in a circle around each other in a club, orbiting the same core. You could disappear into the night of these paintings, as dense as it is. It feels like the void that surrounds these characters, is the void of our imposing and claustrophobic reality, the doom space that we all are sadly forced to occupy. Part pop, part surreal, but also well known icons become regulars for Sim: the yucca, the rainbow, the werewolves, the stars, they all persist, resist, overlay in a manner that could stop at joy but actually offers more, something essential, a gateway to the idea that narrative is possible.

I have spent a long time walking in suburbia at night, on the outskirts of cities, the places where I could afford to live, using that night space as my own. It’s dangerous, of course, but when you find the right window it is also a time that has more possibilities than any other, becoming a warped yet honest reality. The sail boat, the bedding plants, the duck tree, the tulips, the garlands, all pick away at a possibility that things can be freer, less ashamed of themselves.

It’s pretty obvious: front gardens are made for spectacle. But, if we are honest, everyone enjoys looking, don’t they? No one shies away from looking at a spectacle. Jealous of the honest expression, jealous of the glamour, but all the while not wanting to see the full picture, not wanting to see the deep work that is going on underneath to keep standing up, to reach further and further down into the soil, relying on the roots of others in order to stay standing. 

Mining more and more nutrients from this diminishing, decaying earth in order to persevere. In order to survive.