THE GARDENERS. 2006-2026
The Gardeners is a long-running mythological ecosystem within Gilbert’s practice, first emerging in 2006 in the aftermath of her parents’ violent divorce, her father’s abuse, and the wider betrayal of the family structure. These figures arrived not simply as fantasy characters, but as a form of restorative justice: subterranean beings who came through lucid dreams, trance states, and obsessive drawing as psychic correctives to a world in which violence so often goes unanswered.
ABOUT THE WORK
Over time, the Gardeners became far more than a series. They developed into an entire cosmology that has quietly informed Gilbert’s wider practice for nearly two decades. Cave-dwelling, crepuscular, and deeply mycelial, they move through underground networks of roots and fungal threads, acting as guardians of balance within a parallel underworld. They are not benign creatures, but elemental agents of correction, emerging where human systems have failed and where crimes against the body, the land, and the feminine have gone unresolved.
What began as a private descent into the unconscious gradually revealed itself as a sustained shamanic language. Through drawings, trance notes, invented anatomies, and speculative rituals, Gilbert became both witness to and conduit for their world. The Gardeners speak through a symbolic lexicon shaped by grief, feminine rage, ecological dread, and a desire for accountability. In this universe, justice is not abstract or delayed; it travels along invisible mycelial pathways and is composted back into the living order.
The series also sits at the root of a broader ecosystem of archetypes that continues across Gilbert’s work, feeding into later figures such as the Shadow, the Scapegoat, the Sorceress, and the portal-based works. The Gardeners mark an early and enduring attempt to transform psychic wounding into image, myth, and ritual structure. They are part folklore, part field guide, part survival mechanism: a way of giving form to what could not be processed otherwise.
This body of work is also bound to Baptism by Fire. A significant number of the drawings and pages connected to the Gardeners survived the house fire that destroyed seven years of unseen work. Scorched by flames, drenched by fire hoses, buried in ash, and later flown back to London through the element of air, these surviving works became the material basis for a new alchemical cycle. Reworked over time with blood and saliva, they shifted from archive to relic, carrying the Gardeners forward not simply as images, but as proof of endurance, transformation, and return.