Welcome to our Garden

“If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks and gardens.” — Rebecca Solnit

During the slow winter months we gladly leave behind, we have been quietly busy preparing the ground for our new Rights Studio Garden. Now it’s time to reconnect. 

Beyond just another metaphor, gardens hold so much symbolism: they offer us a way of understanding our work, our role, and our vision while also developing our ecological awareness. 

As we wrote before, they are also a symbol of our inner life; an ideal we aspire to. As a physical space, a garden is a place we can get lost in, where we can slow down, contemplate, reflect, think, but it is also a place that requires care, patience, and hard work.

So we raked the soil, we cleaned, and weeded, we planted some seeds and now are ready to invite you to take a walk with us in our new garden — our digital space to make art and human rights grow, aka, our website

As you wander, you will see that this is a work in progress and things will begin to bloom and mushroom in the weeks to come. We hope it better reflects who we are and what we do. May it be a place that entices you to contribute, or simply contemplate and be quietly curious. We hope you enjoy the view and the walk we start together.


Words, Veronica Yates
illustration, Miriam Sugranyes

References and Further Reading

Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit 

The Overstory, Richard Powers

Wintering, The power of rest and retreat in difficult times, Katherine May

Nov 1, 2024

Extending Resistance

“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. … Acceptance of the lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.” — Hannah Arendt

Oct 15, 2021

Why We Walk

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking.” — Henry David Thoreau

Jun 23, 2023

Beyond Civil Disobedience

“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde

Jul 9, 2021

Utopia as a Garden

May 28, 2021

In Pursuance of Curiosity

“It’s not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. It’s tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers.”― Merlin Sheldrake

Feb 4, 2022

Seeking Simplicity

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move the opposite direction.”— E. F. Schumacher