Kehler Liddell Gallery | Photography | Arts & Culture | Visual Arts | Westville
Cone Hedge and Cloud. Photo Courtesy Marjorie Wolfe.
On a sunny day in November 2021, Marjorie Gillette Wolfe was visiting the island of Martha’s Vineyard when she came upon a large hedge.
It was L-shaped, roughly ten feet high, with squared-off edges that looked a bit overdue for a trim. Many of the hedge’s leaves had already fallen to the ground but it remained a dense thicket, difficult to see through. Behind it, just barely perceptible, was a white house. In front, between Wolfe and the hedge, were about a dozen large rocks, arranged roughly in a circle.
Nothing about the hedge was particularly extraordinary, but it held Wolfe’s attention. She took out her camera and snapped a photograph.
“I just was fascinated by this spot because of its mystery,” she said.
Two years down the line, Wolfe hasn’t stopped thinking about—or taking pictures of—hedges. The New Haven-based photographer’s obsession culminates in a new exhibition, aptly titled Hedge, which runs October 12 to November 12 at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville. Last weekend, Wolfe was at Keller Liddell to discuss her work as part of Westville Open Studios, a neighborhood-wide event which included work from over 20 artists across several galleries and studios.
Ocean Park Hedge. Photo Courtesy Marjorie Wolfe.
“I’m happy with this body of work in its breadth, in its tight concept,” she said in an interview at the gallery on Sunday. “It could have been really boring.”
It certainly isn’t. Wolfe’s images span an emotional gamut that is astoundingly wide given the subject of each is, well, just a bush—however manicured that bush may be. There are comic hedges and solemn hedges, sheepish hedges and sinister ones. In her photograph Ocean Park Hedge, a family of bulbous shrubs seem to advance across the horizon towards a lone rock on the other side of the frame.
It’s a dramatic scene, shot in black and white, with a cloudy sky filling the top two-thirds of the composition. Quotidian yard accouterments take on an almost divine character.
Wolfe’s images offer a meditation on the uncanny space hedges occupy between humans and nature. They call viewers to reflect on the pervasiveness of this quotidian greenery across the built environment; they capture that as much as hedges are bent to the whim of landscapers and gardeners, so too do they take on a life of their own.
Pickup and Hedge. Photo Courtesy Marjorie Wolfe.
Several images show hedges that have been shorn into the shape of a pine tree—carefully trimmed into stout, smooth copies of their coniferous counterparts. In others, hedges lie in the background, nevertheless announcing themselves loudly. Pickup and Hedge shows a broken-down truck slowly being eaten up by an unruly mass of leafy branches. Sportscar features a towering wall of roadside greenery behind a car enclosed by a cloth cover.
“I love what they do—the ‘conceal and reveal,’” Wolfe said. “What are they hiding? What’s behind that?”
While Wolfe began her project in earnest in 2021, after photographing the Martha’s Vineyard hedge—which she has since returned to several times, capturing over a hundred images—she has been taking pictures of hedges for much longer.
“As I realized I had to start preparing for this exhibit, choosing what would I use of the hundreds and hundreds of photographs I’ve shot over the last two years, it occurred to me, ‘Oh my God, Margie, you’ve been photographing hedges for decades, not two years.’”
Soon, memories of specific hedges she had encountered while working on other photography projects came rushing back to her, and she began to comb through her own archive of images, picking them out. There were the dead-straight hedges lining the approach to the French palace of Vaux-le-Vicomte. And the hedge reflected in the window of a roadside store in upstate New York.
The House Facing Chappaquiddick. Photo Courtesy Marjorie Wolfe.
It turned out that, on her annual visit to a friend in Northern California, she had taken pictures of hedges. And on a trip to Italy which she took in 2002, Wolfe seemed to have been more engrossed by the tall, tapering Italian Cypresses lining the edges of a parking lot than the ornate castle which she had driven to see.
"I think I’ve always been taken in by geometry—a subject in which I was not good in school,” Wolfe said with a laugh. “I’ve always been fond of repetition.”
“In most of my exhibits I have an overarching idea, and I shoot with that idea in mind,” she added. “This just was so broad, it was wonderful. I really felt like I had a lot of opportunity.”
Wolfe, who grew up less than a mile from Kehler Liddell Gallery, remembers encountering her first hedge at the age of five. “My best friend lived on the block behind me. To get to her house, you either had to walk up the street, take a right, and go down the street to get to her house. Or I could cross through two backyards that had a hedge separating them, and there was just enough space for a little girl to get through to go from one street to the next. I think that was my first hedge experience.”
Now, after spending years photographing hedges—consciously and otherwise—Wolfe noted that it’s impossible for her to walk around without considering each and every one she encounters. “Once I see it, it becomes part of me. I’m probably gonna see that forever.”
She is unsure what her next project will be about, though it seems likely that at least a few hedges will sneak into the edge of the frame.
Hedge runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave. in New Haven, through Nov. 12.