The exhibition title refers to a faux ruin at Stowe Gardens, a rambling landscape garden developed by British army officer and Whig politician Richard Temple (1675–1749), the 1st Viscount Cobham, and other members of his family on their estate at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, during the Georgian era. Shaped by prominent architects and garden designers, and popularised via guidebooks, Stowe became a quintessential example of the English landscape garden. Such gardens expressed—directly and indirectly—the ambitions and attitudes of the English aristocracy. They sought to celebrate the natural environment but also radically reformed it. Studded with follies and sculptures, they were performances of ‘civilisation’ and ‘cultivation’, deeply influenced by idealised landscape paintings by artists like Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), and by the fashionable Grand Tour. Stowe is today administered by the National Trust and a much-loved attraction. Green visited in 2024, during an extended trip to the United Kingdom. She found in the garden a framework for considering a wide range of subjects, including ideology, power, class, property rights, appropriation, imitation, erasure, indoctrination, identity-building, myth-making, imperialism, and nationalism, particularly in relation to Britain and the British Empire.★☆★Central to Ruin on the Cascade is a series of arched paintings depicting statues of the nine Muses of Greek religion or mythology at Stowe. The statues are recent recreations (they were installed in 2020) based on now-lost models that were themselves imitations of Classical examples. They flank a triumphal arch, the Doric Arch, at the entrance to the Elysian Fields, an area within the garden that takes its name from a paradisal realm where the souls of heroic and virtuous people reside after death in Greek tradition. For Cobham, the Elysian Fields were a site of propaganda. Greco-Roman motifs were used to promote a vision of England as a place of gallantry, nobility, learning, and sophistication, and to underscore his political views. In front of each Muse, Green plants British wildflowers that overgrow and add vibrancy to the stark white figures. She creates juxtapositions of the divine and the earthly, the ideal and the real, the artificial and the natural, the affected and the authentic, the anachronistic and the current. She suggests that English culture has long been voracious and self-conscious—consuming exotic or ancient cultures, blending them with the homegrown, and calling on them to enhance or legitimise itself. At the same time, she points to the fact that many entities, cultural and biological, span Europe, ignoring national borders entirely. British wildflowers are not solely found in Britain.★☆★Notions of the exotic and widespread are further explored in Orange Tree #1 and Orange Tree #2, which allude to the phenomenon of the orangery, a protected garden or building where orange trees are cultivated in colder climes normally hostile to the plant, like Britain. The moveable green containers depicted are based on models from Versailles, a place that bears a certain family resemblance to Stowe. A View of a Village highlights an odious process carried out at Stowe and similar sites: ‘depopulation’. The settlements of Boycott, Dadford, Lamport, and Stowe were all cleared to make way for the estate and garden. Green’s work honours the vanished people. It is based on a painting formerly kept at Stowe House, A View of a Village (c. 1645) by David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690), which burlesques villagers as comical, simple, and inclined to vice. Green homes in on three figures at the centre of the image, elevating them to her primary subject. She emphasises their status as stock characters in the Teniers and accords them new dignity. The poor of the English countryside faced a host of upheavals in the Georgian era, not least the enclosure of common lands. Meanwhile, rural motifs were incorporated into English landscape gardens and paintings to enhance their picturesque quality. Villagers in England were recast as quaint relics, romanticised and diminished in the same breath—as indigenous people were elsewhere.★☆★The Courtyard includes present-day garden ornaments bought in Aotearoa that refer to the English countryside and to royalty: a fox, a goose, a mallard, a squirrel, and two lions clutching shields adorned with fleurs-de-lis. The installation recalls the persistent influence of English ideas, values, structures, and symbols all around the world, as well as the detrimental effects of introduced species. The Lake is a grand self-portrait showing Green asleep, Venus-like against a backdrop of the Octagon Lake at Stowe. Beginning as an octagonal pool within an older formal garden, the lake was reshaped during the 18th century to make it appear more natural. In Green’s depiction, the water is scattered with lilies and lily pads that resemble islands or continents, and inhabited by a trio of proud swans. The painting evokes diverse fantasies: fantasies about ourselves and our homes, fantasies about far-off places we may never visit, fantasies of paradises lost and found, fantasies of power and glory. Like all the works in Ruin on the Cascade, it is noticeably theatrical, stagy, dramatic. Green suggests that many individuals who have exerted control over the vulnerable—from the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’ to the present—have at their core been fantasists, folk at once out of step with reality and able to bend reality to their peculiar and often ruinous whims.★☆★Ayesha Green and Season wish to warmly thank the following people for making Ruin on the Cascade possible: Sorawit Songsataya, Janita and Lucretia Craw, Christina Green, Claire Olsen and Robbie Fraser, Robbie Handcock, Tim Wagg, Seb Charles, and Daniel.