Conceptually similar to the motivations of a cabinet of curiosities, the carefully selected realm of botanical gardens is another space in which honours the collection of the natural world. Parallel to the act of designing and displaying sections of a botanical garden Valdez has selected moments from the landscapes and referenced them in her still life paintings in a theatrical background which allowed the objects to exist in a dream-like space.

In “Portal to Stone Cranes in Botanical Garden Pond, 2024” and “Pond Landscape with Shells and Plants, 2024”, Valdez wanted to reference a scene reminiscent of Claude Monet's Water Lilies series. She thought of the impact Eastern art, particularly Japanese woodcuts, “Ukiyo-e” of the Edo period, had on the impressionist era and how this painting held a similar discourse between Western and Eastern ideals of serene beauty.

The picture collages a botanical garden experience. The paintings portray a portal of a stone gate adorned with blue and white geometric tiles or pink with black and white tiles, accentuated by the presence of plants positioned at the edges of the composition or shells in the centre bottom, signifying the expansive vista extending beyond the confines of the depicted landscape.

The circular framing device employed in the artwork evokes parallels to the architectural concept of a “moon gate,” commonly observed in Chinese garden design. Functioning as an aesthetically captivating element, the moon gate generates a sense of anticipation upon entering the garden, while symbolically representing the cyclical rhythms inherent in the natural world. While this scene illustrates an exterior space it still holds a sense of the domestic. The botanical garden which is a manicured landscape only able to survive as is with human intervention.