Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter presents WILD, an exhibition exploring our relationship with the natural world and looking at how people across the globe are creating, rebuilding and repairing connections with nature.
Will going ‘wild’ help us to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis? Can ‘wildness’ flourish within a city like Exeter? How do we care for things we can’t see?
Wild will challenge the way we think about nature, whisking you to wild places across the world. Find out how communities, researchers and activists are shaping their environments and looking to ‘wild’ for a more positive future. A particular highlight for me, are two films documenting the restoration of traditional practices is helping to heal both the land and the people in Western Australia. Other parts of the exhibition feature places such as Knep where biodiversity has exploded when farmland has been rewilded, and the reintroduction of animal species is helping to restore ecological balance.
My own contribution is a suite of four large drawings of the rapidly declining Great, or Garden Tiger Moth Arctia caja. I’ve long had a relationship with the Lepidoptera collection at RAMM, and so this commission was a wonderful opportunity for me to explore further and to make something reflective and hopefully poetic as my contribution to this fascinating and information-packed exhibtion.
You can watch a video interview with myself, curator Lara Goodband and collections officer Holly Morgenroth that goes into more depth about both my thinking behind the commission and the collection I worked from – Here
