Gardening with My Grandmother Exhibition + Programming

Gardening with My Grandmother is an ongoing photographic series exploring grief, memory, legacy, and connection across generations through family photographs and the living flowers of my grandmother’s garden.

My grandmother’s garden had always extended beyond her own yard. She shared flowers and plants with friends, neighbors, and her community, creating connections that continued to bloom in other people’s gardens. After my grandmother passed away, her North Dakota garden disappeared beneath years of weeds. When my grandfather passed and I had a garden of my own, my mother and I returned to dig up what remained. We dug unknown roots and bulbs from the overgrown earth that remembered my grandmother’s garden. We drove them eight hours to Minnesota over several trips, planted them, and waited.

During that time, I discovered an album my grandmother had made documenting the garden she loved in sometimes blurry and out of focus images, lovingly archived in a photo album kept in her nightstand Pairing her photographs with her flowers that continue to bloom today, this ongoing series explores legacy, memory and our connection through time and place each time the garden blooms. In extending her garden to Minnesota, my mother and I became part of that same tradition of sharing plants and the relationships and memories attached to them from one place and generation to another.

Exhibition Possibilities

Gardening with My Grandmother can be adapted to a variety of exhibition spaces and presented as a selection of individual works or as a larger body of photographic pairings.

The exhibition can be accompanied by participatory programming exploring grief, memory, family legacy, photography, gardening, and the ways traditions and objects connect us to the people we love.

Programming can be adapted to the venue, audience, season, accessibility needs, and available resources.

Artist-Led Still Life Photography Workshop

Photographing Memory: Exploring Grief and Legacy Through Still Life

In this artist-led workshop, participants explore how still life photography can be used to remember and honor someone they love.

Participants are invited to bring an object, photograph, flower, piece of clothing, book, tool, recipe, or other meaningful item connected to someone important to them. Through approachable instruction in lighting, composition, color, perspective, and visual storytelling, participants create a still life that considers not only what an object looks like, but what it carries.

The workshop draws from the process behind Gardening with My Grandmother, in which inherited photographs and living flowers become a way of exploring grief, memory, connection, and legacy.

No previous photography experience is necessary. The workshop can be adapted for participants using smartphones or cameras and for different experience levels.

Artist Talk

What We Carry Forward: Art, Grief, Memory, and Legacy

In this artist talk, Jessiena Lake discusses the creation of Gardening with My Grandmother, from recovering plants from her grandmother’s overgrown North Dakota garden to discovering the photo album that became the foundation of the series.

The conversation explores how photography and still life can provide a way to approach grief through the objects, traditions, images, and living things that remain. It also considers inherited creative practices, family archives, the imperfect photograph as a record of love, and the ways making art can create new relationships with memories over time.

The talk can be presented independently or paired with the still life photography workshop.

Community Memory Guestbook

Tell Us About Someone You Love

Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to contribute to a shared memory guestbook.

Rather than asking visitors to respond specifically to gardening, the guestbook expands the exhibition’s questions of memory and legacy to their own relationships and experiences.

Prompts may include:

Share a favorite memory of someone you love.

What did your loved one love to do?

What is your loved one’s legacy?

What is something they taught you that you still carry with you?

What is something that always makes you think of them?

Visitors may respond to one prompt, several, or simply read the memories others have chosen to share.

Over the course of the exhibition, the book becomes a collective archive of ordinary lives, relationships, traditions, humor, love, and remembrance—a record of the many ways people continue to exist in the lives of those who remember them.

Community Plant Swap

Extending the Garden

When season and venue allow, the exhibition opening or another scheduled event can include a community plant swap inspired by my grandmother’s tradition of sharing plants from her garden.

Community members are invited to bring plants, divisions, cuttings, bulbs, or seeds to exchange with one another. As plants move from one home to another, the exchange extends one of the central ideas behind Gardening with My Grandmother beyond the gallery walls.

My grandmother shared her garden with friends, neighbors, and her community. Years later, my mother and I continued that tradition by carrying her surviving plants from North Dakota to Minnesota. The plant swap invites visitors to participate in the same practice: sharing something living, allowing it to take root somewhere new, and creating connections between people through the plants they grow.

The format can be adapted in partnership with the host venue according to season, space, and local plant-sharing guidelines.

A Living, Participatory Exhibition

At its center, Gardening with My Grandmother is a personal story about my grandmother, her photographs, her flowers, and the garden my mother and I carried forward.

But the exhibition also asks larger questions:

How do we remember the people we love?

What do they leave with us?

What do we choose to carry forward?

How can photographs, objects, traditions, and living things connect us across time?

Through photographs, conversation, art-making, written memories, and the exchange of living plants, Gardening with My Grandmother can become a space for viewing one family’s history and memories and for visitors to explore and share their own.