Camilla Shivarg has participated in the Chelsea Festival for many years. Originally showing work at her home in Edith Grove and opening her tiny gem of a garden to the public, she moved to Earl's Court in 1998 where a larger garden and a dedicated gallery space have given her greater opportunities to display her talents.

Camilla is a figurative painter and sculptor. Trained at Chelsea and Wimbledon and apprenticed to the distinguished sculptor Karin Jonzen, she specialises in portraiture and the nude creating distinctive works in oil and acrylic, terracotta and bronze.

Camilla's smaller sculptures, of languorous nudes and Burmese cats (sometimes together) are extremely affordable and collectable objects, highly prized by those lucky enough to acquire them. Her larger pieces work well out of doors and several can be seen in the garden at 286 Earl's Court Road, lounging by the fishpond, strategically placed in the shrubbery or grimacing from the garden walls.

The garden itself, just behind one of London's busiest roads, comes as a surprise to all its visitors. One enters this 70 foot oasis in the midst of cosmopolitan Earl's Court via a York stone terrace surrounded by pots and raised stone beds, packed with unusual annuals and tender perennials including Cannas, Daturas, Salvias and Dahlias. Steps lead up past a round pond, surmounted by a head of the Green Man, onto a circular lawn with more raised beds around it containing bog plants, bamboos and imaginative plant combinations. The last third of the garden is under the canopy of a spreading walnut tree, paved and planted with a variety of ferns, hydrangeas and interesting shade-tolerant specimens.

Camilla has received many awards for her gardens from Chelsea Gardeners Guild and the Brighter Kensington & Chelsea Scheme. The garden in Earl's Court was featured last year in the Times Saturday Magazine.

Camilla Shivarg's sculpture shows neither the modern taste for idiosyncratic self-exhibitionism nor the imitative realism of the figure, but a real fusion of the subject and the artist.

There are no figures just like hers, and her portraits will continue to be admired for this quality and not at all for just being a replica of the sitter.

Her dancers and acrobats have inherent rhythm and grace, without a trace of 'arrested movement' - the petrified look that mars so much sculpture.