Garden of Just Enough - Red Rubber Road in FIGURES Photography Magazine

Garden of Just Enough is a haunting visual exploration of identity, control, and the

psychological afterimage of isolated communities.

Artist : Red Rubber Road

Series : Garden of Just Enough

Website / Instagram

In this body of work, artist duo Red Rubber Road collapse the boundaries between past and present, merging performance and photography with archival material to construct a surreal, fragmented narrative. Using images and texts from their upbringing in the ‘Children of God’, a cult marked by extreme apocalyptic beliefs and ‘free love’, they dissect and reconstruct memory through visual strategies of censorship, layering, and erasure. What emerges is not a documentary account, but an atmospheric, disorienting space that evokes the internal logic of cult life: the suppression of individuality, the saturation of belief, the imposed objectification of the female body. Through staged self-portraits, manipulated imagery, and appropriated materials, Red Rubber Road present a censored version of their past that deliberately withholds resolution. The viewer is pulled into a visual terrain that is both seductive and discomforting—left with unanswered questions, uneasy recognition, and the lingering presence of something not fully seen.

Our self-portraits taken in nature as our naked bodies and hidden faces mingled with each other, so that you couldn’t tell who is who, was our way of expressing a life of hiding and living in a group where we had a shared identity and our individuality was not considered.

The duo’s practice began in adolescence: two friends creating elaborate fantasy worlds in lack of external input. From tissue-box cinemas to analog photography, they developed a visual language shaped by surveillance, limitation, and play. Their imagery today retains this duality: it’s both intuitive and meticulously constructed, personal yet symbolic. Since founding Red Rubber Road in 2015, they have navigated themes of shared identity, anonymity, dissociation, censorship, intimacy and objectification, using the body not as self-expression, but as a shifting surface of projection.

The use of internal cult documents that were not meant for outsiders adds another layer of tension. These censored texts appear in this work as narrative cues rather than explanations, echoing the secrecy of the source material. The images of Garden of Just Enough breathe with ambiguity, as language, image, and identity are repeatedly fractured and reconfigured. The viewer becomes complicit in this fragmentation—piecing together a story that resists clarity.

Leaving everything you believed in, the people and the only reality you knew behind brings a big sense of loss. This eternal search for belonging is something that we will most likely always carry with us.

What makes Garden of Just Enough so timely is how it mirrors the psychological structures of contemporary society. The mechanisms of manipulation, charismatic leadership, and the blurring of public and private boundaries are not relics of fringe groups, they are patterns visible in our politics, online behavior, and social formations today. Red Rubber Road’s work does not only reconstruct a personal past, it subtly illuminates the ever-present machinery of belief and belonging that continues to shape us all.