June, 2020. In reflecting on the pandemic, a friend remarked, "We are all in turbulent waters of the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat." In The Garden is an account of one two-person boat: it expresses the contents of our days at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. While practicing shelter-in-place orders, daily labor in our community garden grounded us and afforded us goals and responsibilities. It’s work that steadies pace, connects the worker to their immediate surroundings, and repeatedly offers physical rewards (food!). Tending our plot was a metaphoric stand-in to suddenly impaired studio practices: the garden balances wildlife and sublime nature on structural foundations of geometric beds, using daily attention and control. My process incorporates similar means: expressive mark and frenetic movement into the sturdy architecture of functional pots. Daniel’s paintings balance muscular, loose brush strokes on well mapped, acutely observed representational space. The work that we’ve produced is the culmination of our quarantine- extended meditation in oil paint as each bed grows, and clay constructed vessels to elevate and propagate our garden’s growth.