Inspired by the people, landscape, literature and art of her native México, Flor Garduño’s photography explores themes of ritual, spirituality and the female body. The exhibition highlights a selection of works made between 1982-2022, revealing symmetries across four decades of Garduño’s work. Her genre-fusing practice merges a surreal style of portraiture and still-life with lyrical forms of landscape and documentary photography. Purposefully ambiguous, Garduño’s work is layered with signs and symbols, combining the spiritual and secular within a single frame. One of México’s leading photographers, ‘In Dreams’ will be Garduño’s first UK exhibition in 30 years and her first solo presentation in London.

On her first professional assignment for the department of Public Education, Garduño was asked to photograph rural communities in remote villages across México for primary school textbooks. This project inspired her best-known series, ‘Witnesses of Time’ (1992), where she travelled through México, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. Without being anthropological in her focus, Garduño celebrates the imaginative power of native cultures in South and Central America: their rituals, folklore, and daily life. Through her distinctive use of dark and light, Garduño’s photographs emphasise the lyrical and poetic above the social and political.

A recurring theme in much of Garduño’s work is the liminal space where human and animal, human and vegetal combine. Such hybrids are common to many cultures and have long been a way to represent dreams, fortune, gods and the order of the cosmos. Garduño references pre-Columbian rituals and mythology, where humans are linked to an ‘animal soul’ at birth and where certain creatures are revered. In her later series, ‘Inner Light’ (2002), Garduño enhances the powers of her female subjects with the strengths of various flora and fauna. In ‘Hoja Elegante’ (1998) and ‘Vestido Eterno’ (1999), Garduño adorns her nude subjects with roses and giant leaves. In ‘Pavoreal’ (1999), two bare ankles emerge from underneath a majestic peacock. Like many of her female contemporaries, Garduño turns to nonrealist representations of the human body to explore cultural ideas of ‘the female form’, as well as individual relationships between women’s identities and bodies. These theatrical compositions recall both the Surrealist attempt to render the oneiric, and the Latin American influence of Magical Realism. Combining the sensual nature of femininity with a touch of the uncanny, Garduño manifests a new feminine imagery that examines the measure, magic and connotative power of the female body.