The Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project

The Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project (MSGP) is an artist-led platform for contemporary art that explores the relationship between art, landscape, and the urban environment. Founded in 2012, the project has transformed the garden of Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury into a site for artistic experimentation, dialogue, and public encounter.

Over the past thirteen years MSGP has presented eight open-air exhibitions featuring the work of 87 artists from the UK and internationally. Each exhibition has invited artists to respond directly to the garden – its atmosphere, ecology, history, and its position within the wider fabric of the city. Works have taken many forms, from subtle interventions and sculptural installations to conceptual gestures and collaborative processes. Together they have turned the garden into a temporary laboratory for thinking through questions of landscape, movement, ecology, and social space.

At the heart of the project lies the idea that landscape is not a static backdrop but a living field of relationships and processes. The exhibitions have explored this idea from many perspectives. Some have approached the garden as a space shaped by constant transformation, where weather, time, and environmental conditions create ever-changing situations. Or, on the contrast between the controlled space of the gallery and the unpredictability of the outdoors, questioning how art is experienced when it moves beyond the 'white cube'.

Projects have considered walking, observation, and the experience of the city as creative acts, inviting artists to respond to the rhythms, tensions, and fleeting moments that define urban life. Other iterations of MSGP have expanded outward to consider global connections and systems of exchange. Projects have explored how ideas, people, materials, and ecological processes move across borders and distances, shaping landscapes and communities in ways that are both visible and invisible. In these works the garden becomes a point of departure – a small, local space through which larger networks of movement, communication, and transformation can be imagined/analysed.

Across all of its exhibitions, MSGP has treated the garden as both material and inter-disciplinary metaphor: a place where artistic, ecological, and social questions can be tested. Gardens carry a long cultural history as spaces of cultivation, reflection, and experimentation, and the artists involved in the project have extended this tradition in contemporary ways. Because the exhibitions take place outdoors and are temporary, many of the works exist only for a short period of time. While this ephemerality is central to the project’s character, it also means that much of its history has remained relatively invisible beyond those who experienced it directly.

This website has therefore been created as a digital archive and research platform for the Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project. It brings together documentation of past exhibitions, images of artworks, artist statements, texts, and recordings, allowing the ideas and conversations generated by the project to remain accessible after the installations themselves have disappeared.

The Project is conceived and organised by artist Clair Joy.

With thanks to the Mecklenburgh Square Garden Committee, Goodenough College, Andrew Gillman and Viridiana Mayagoitia.

More information about the history of Mecklenburgh Square Garden.

Website: Royal Jelly Factory