Ebony G. Patterson, and the pleasure that lives inside the weight
There is a kind of beauty that asks nothing of you.
And then there is the kind she makes.
You enter, and the first thing is pleasure. Sequins, beading, crochet, blooms spilling from above — a density she calls the muchness of the work. It is gorgeous in a way that is almost rude. You came to look. You stay because you cannot help it. That is the design.
“Beauty, for me, is a tool of seduction. A trap.Ebony G. Patterson
The trap is not cruel. It is an invitation to stay long enough to see what a quicker glance would miss — that the garden is also a grave, that the flowers are funerary as much as festive, that the figures in the overgrowth are present precisely because they are no longer there.
“How do I get people to look beneath the landscape?The question beneath the work
Since 2013 the garden has been her central figure — real and imagined at once. For Patterson it is never only pretty. It is a postcolonial space: a place where things were collected, transported, arranged, made to live together under someone else’s design. The British, she has noted, moved human bodies the way they moved exotic buds.
She reads the old hymn open: the dew is wetness, tears, the ooze of the body; the rose is a funerary flower and a flower of love at once. The word still, she insists, points to transformation — to time not yet run out. The weeds come for everyone. Even so, there is the dew. Even so, there is the rose.
It would be easy to read all of this as heavy. It is. But she refuses to let the weight cancel the joy.
“There are even greater acts of pleasure. It is the joy in doing, in making, in discovering.On what sustains the work
Not pleasure as the opposite of grief. Not beauty as a way to look away. Pleasure as the very engine of the witnessing. Her gardens trap us in beauty so we will stay long enough to feel; she stays in the labor of beauty so she can keep making at all. The mechanism she uses on us is the one that sustains her.
Stand in one of her gardens and you learn something about your own looking. How quickly you wanted only the loveliness. How long it took to see the rest. How the rest was always there, beneath the landscape, asking to be acknowledged. And how — this is the part that stays — you are glad you stayed.
That gladness, even here, especially here, is the pleasure she means.