Long ago the forest was singing, and the songs had a shape. Landscapes are built from fields that organise themselves, like tree rings they build upon each other. I have worked in gardens all my life and the sheer variety of nature is ridiculous. Nature gets away with things that should not work. What works, works, nothing breaks the rules. Life happens at the limits. Breathing in, breathing out.

The same net shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. It’s fascinating to me. I’m sure you have seen oil in water? Or zebra stripes and leopard spots? These are thought to arise from reaction-diffusion systems, the kind Alan Turing described, where two chemicals spread at different rates and settle into repeating patterns. Weirdly, it’s not just seen in living things. On the Australian coast it is called honeycomb weathering, stone lace, or miniature tafoni. Salt spray from the sea soaks into porous sandstone or greywacke. As the water evaporates the salts crystallise inside the pores and prise the grains apart. Wind and rain then carry the loosened material away, leaving tight clusters of small circular pits separated by thin walls. The process is still debated by geologists, which is part of why it feels so mysterious. Crown shyness in the canopy is another version branches that refuse to touch, leaving gaps that look like a net of light. Evolution arriving at a solution that works.

A crack is the one thing a painter is trained to avoid, but I love it. The crack is the physics showing its hand, the moment the material tells you what it actually is instead of what you asked it to be. I want that kind of honesty in a surface, the kind that comes from letting the process run rather than forcing it into a shape.

Below the scale of the hand, cells gathering, channels opening between them. It lives briefly on the surface and a battle is fought. Curious and spellbound, I watch an amalgamation of forces crystallise, waves and ripples from within. The structure holds. It dries and flattens to the canvas.

It still feels mysterious to me. Alive, somehow. Beauty that also frightens you a little. The holes in the net can do that. For sufferers of trypophobia, or otherwise a fear of the unknown.

Pareidolia is the brain’s pattern-matching system misfiring on random noise, while trypophobia is the same system flagging clustered holes as a potential threat. I paint because I want to work inside that tension, where the pattern is still forming and hasnt yet been named. The same structure repeats at every scale, so the smallest cell and the largest system are running the same programme.

Sense that there’s something much bigger at play. I want the painting to hold both: the unease, and the beauty of the fragile scaffolding of life. The pattern is not a texture laid on top of a picture. It is a field that has already decided how to occupy space, dark cells packed so that what remains between them is a pale, continuous net. Looked at as structure it is thrifty and lawful. In the paintings that net settles into forest and light.

Inherent to it is hierarchy without a ruler. Nothing is repeated and everything rhymes.

A garden that has years in it teaches a particular kind of authorship. You arrive after the roots have opinions. The trees have taken their shape. Painting is a little bit like gardening, you look and see what is an error. On a blank canvas the error is the absence of anything at all, the feeling that nothing is right yet, or doesnt give me the sense of a thing. You are an orchestra of colour and composition.

The pattern behaves like a self-organising field. I weave it into the landscape to get a sense of life as an illusion, revealing a glimpse of the code in the simulation.