Harley Weir’s The Garden at Hannah Barry Gallery doesn’t aim to beautify the ruin—it metabolizes it.

This is not nostalgia-as-veneer, but nostalgia as chemical reaction, corrosive and generative, like the alchemical mash of blood, hormones, butterfly wings, and vitamins she literally injects into the darkroom process. It’s a material politics of desire, decay, and feminine becoming that won’t allow for clean binaries—mother/daughter, utopia/heterotopia, image/abstraction—without first liquefying them.

The bifurcated curation between upstairs and downstairs mimics the psychoanalytic schema of the divided self. Below, adulthood is reconfigured not as arrival but as estrangement. The aged body, the loop of care, the temporal drag of the “clock”––Weir’s downstairs suite feels like a durational performance staged across the epidermis. Meanwhile, upstairs turns adolescence into a reliquary: handmade paper embeds the flotsam of teenage affect—dried flora, pen-pal ephemera, perfumes remembered only by their afterglow. These new pieces function less like images and more like hormonal haikus—soft, sugar-pastel invocations of an interiority that is tender, cinematic, and resolutely unshareable.

The Garden offers no Edenic illusions. Weir’s title points instead to a post-Eden: the garden as battleground, as psychosexual compost heap, as biotech fantasy. Her revived Sickos project radicalizes the chemical process of image-making itself. If the photograph has historically been a site of indexical truth, Weir turns it into a hallucination: bodily fluids and pharmaceutical detritus destabilize any claim to neutrality, producing abstractions that are feral, ungovernable, queer in the truest etymological sense.

This isn’t merely the female gaze—it’s the female chemical, volatilized. Her images aren’t about women; they are experiments in womanhood as process, as instability, as anarchic potential. What’s politically urgent here is the way Weir refuses closure. Her archive of activism—on abortion, refugee rights, sex work—isn’t didactic or aestheticized. Instead, it’s interwoven with her imagery’s affective charge, reminding us that activism is not always protest—it’s also memory, eroticism, and the messy continuity of care.