Contributed by Adam Simon / I happened to visit Mary Carlson’s exhibition “Garden” at Kerry Schuss Gallery the day I finished reading Titus Groan, the first of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, written in the 1950s. I’m not usually drawn to fantasy fiction – this book was a gift – but Peake’s dreamlike rendering of a forbidding castle with clinging ivy and bizarre inhabitants had me in thrall, primed to receive Carlson’s medieval world and its symbiotic relationships between plants and people. One of the characters in Titus Groan uses the ivy to scale the castle walls, while two others take tea on a tree that grows horizontally out one of the windows. While not exactly ivy, vines fashioned from copper piping figure prominently in “Garden,”often dwarfing the mostly female glazed porcelain saints that sit on modest carved wooden shelves. The untamed power of the natural world, and humanity’s marginal presence in it, is an underlying theme in “Garden” and very like the world described by Peake.