For the past year and a half, I have been thinking about what happens in the space between ourselves and the natural world. Not simply what a landscape looks like, but what it does to us.

It was a simple idea: to create a space where we could sit quietly amongst two beauties — nature and art —and see what happened.

This was partly centered on a concept that stillness doesn't necessarily begin with being still.  The mind needs somewhere for its own movement to go — to rustle, bustle, be windy and whirly — before, slowly, it quietens. From my own experience I felt that nature, with all its own movement and irregularity, could offer us that space.

In time, this simple idea expanded. What began as an outdoor experience became a much larger exploration of what happens internally when we spend time within a landscape. The project eventually grew in two directions: an indoor body of paintings exploring those questions, and an outdoor installation returning the work to the landscape where the enquiry began.
Art - inside and out.

I began with leaves. From dense clusters where birds sat and grew, to the single golden fragment that remains as the weather turns cold around me.
 

Then I moved to trees. I learnt about canopy shyness — the phenomenon in which the crowns of certain trees leave narrow channels of space between one another — and found myself returning again and again to ideas of restraint, movement and space. But this wasn't all I observed.

Around me, landscapes increasingly disappearred to development. I watched trees removed as neighbourhoods changed, while others struggled through drought, excessive rain and enduring heat. All the while, shade grew sparser around me.

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