It is in fact upon the world of things needing to be uncovered that the world of merely visible things keeps exerting its pressure.

-Simonides

“What does distance look like?” Anne Carson asks in Autobiography of Red. Here, distance is not only a measure of space but the mutable span between what is seen, understood, remembered, and remade. In Garden Variety Volume VI, Derek Liddington and Emma Welch use sculpture to inhabit this gap, moving beyond the merely visible to where memory becomes story, story becomes myth, and forms mutate through time, relation, and repetition. Installed in the backyard’s cyclical, unpredictable environment, the works are shaped by the same conditions that shape relationships: they grow and shift beyond our control, resist permanence, and change depending on the vantage point from which we return to them.

Liddington’s two white alabaster sculptures—one a massive thumb, the other a hand gripping a chili dog—begin with a memory of his father’s hands. As a child, he saw his father, a bus and truck driver, as immense and strong, his own hands small and lacking that power. Working from contour drawings made from memory and observation of his own hands, Liddington carved the forms at a scale that matched his childhood perception. The process, entirely new to him, demanded a sustained focus on material and memory, unlike the fluency he has with painting. Chiselling away at the stone became a form of dialogue with a father he is no longer in contact with. Over time, the remembered roughness of his father’s hands softened; what once seemed calloused and imposing emerged in stone as tender and delicate. In this way, the sculptures move between literal depiction and semiotic transformation, holding space for both the physical reality of a hand and the psychic weight of what it represents.

Welch’s four wall-mounted reliefs, made from cardboard, wood, and two-part epoxy putty, trace the persistence and evolution of two recurring shapes she calls her “angels.” First drawn five years ago, the forms resisted incorporation into her paintings, resurfacing instead through a series of experiments in flipping, mirroring, and repetition. A failed attempt to translate them into tiles led to an unexpected focus on the negative spaces between them, which she developed into a column. This shift reframed the “angels” as twin flames, echoing the story recounted in Plato’s Symposium when Aristophanes describes a creation myth where humans originally had two bodies, four arms, four legs, and a single head with two faces. This mythical creature was split into two by Zeus as punishment for their pride and ambition, leading humans to spend their lives searching for their other half. In Welch’s hands, these forms are duplicated, rearranged, and layered into four related but non-identical reliefs, each suggesting a moment in an ongoing search for completion that is never quite resolved.

Together, Liddington and Welch approach distance as both a physical and relational condition: a sculpted gap between memory and its retelling, between a form’s origin and its latest iteration. In the backyard, these works are held within a living system—subject to light, weather, and time—that mirrors the instability and interdependence of human connection. They remind us that we cannot exist in isolation from our relations, and that in revisiting what we think we know, we may find it altered, softened, or wholly transformed.