Ames Yavuz proudly presents tending the garden by celebrated Filipina artist Ayka Go, inaugurating her first solo exhibition in Australia.

Go’s large-scale hyperrealistic paintings anatomise the surface of stitched and torn paper. tending the garden moves into deeply personal territory for the artist, sharing her quiet confrontations with grieving and reclaiming womanhood.

Writing about Go’s new body of work, independent curator Stephanie Frondoso says, “The human body is not a machine but a garden, an ecosystem that can heal itself under the right conditions. Springing from this analogy, Ayka Go expands her scope of inquiry from previous themes of girlhood nostalgia to bolder, mature examinations on feminist theory. Through an empowering exploration of the female form, she presents a visceral, deeply personal body of work that is also resonant to the collective experience of self-reclamation.”