Hela Lamine   
My Father’s Gardens —   2025
Solo show · Archivart, Tunis

« In a garden, death does not mark the end of life — it opens onto a new birth. »

Media : Ceramics , Drawing , installation
Themes : Transmission & Heritage , Memory & Disappearance , Living Matter


Photo credit : Raafet Abdelli

December 2023. My father is in a clinic, suffering from terminal-stage cancer. I am in the bed next to his. From the window of his room, we can see magnificent trees dancing in the wind. While he sleeps, I dream-draw gardens. Countless gardens. For him, for me, for whatever will remain of us.

I am entering my seventh month of pregnancy. It is also my father’s final trimester. He passed away one month later.



My Father’s Gardens was born from the encounter between two practices: that of a biologist father and that of an artist, mine. Dreamed, imagined, and traversed gardens where characters, spaces, and temporalities intertwine. Childhood memories of the family garden mingle with those of yesterday—the garden without my father—and with moments when I see him again, watering his plants. Layers of time merge into one another.

Fiction gently overlays reality. The exhibition unfolds through watercolours, ceramics, paintings on ceramic tiles, and assemblages.

A participatory sound work, Listening to Your Gardens, can be heard throughout the exhibition. It is composed from recordings of soundscapes collected from anonymous gardens.

Further on, the laboratory-studio becomes a space where the biologist and the artist meet. A cabinet of curiosities where photographs my father took of his garden every spring coexist with herbariums, drawings, texts, and seeds. What remains. A non-place, a space outside of time.

I collaborated with ceramic artist Fatma Kassabi to create the series of vases and the Tree of Life.

Still Life was my inner garden. My Father’s Gardens is his. Here, the two have met.


 Medium / Date:
Ceramics, drawing, installation, watercolours, paintings on ceramic tiles, assemblages, herbariums, participatory sound work · Archivart, Tunis, November 2025 · With Fatma Kassabi (ceramics) and Samia El Echi (exhibition text).
→ See also : Still Life — Couscous Garden-Table



 Previous project