The work sits where science meets feeling. It doesn’t explain nature. It lets you stand inside the reason nature looks the way it does — and feel, for a moment, that you belong to it.

Landscapes are built from fields that organise themselves, like tree rings they build upon each other. I have been studying processes that can build up in layers to create a world of varying marks that can be felt like a real landscape and really be a window into a forest ‘feeling’. I’ve worked in gardens all my life, the variety and conviction of nature is ridiculous, What works, works and nothing breaks the rules. Life is manifesting from the limits.

Cracking if you apply a layer of slow drying paint with a layer that dries fast over it you will get cracks, some decorators nightmare but I find the effects pleasing. It invites the mind to feel the parched path of the forest floor. With chemical reaction and diffusion I saw an emerging pattern that I recognised as a meta truth.

Below the scale of the hand — cells gathering, channels opening between them — I saw a pattern intrinsic to nature. An abstraction of nature’s underlying habits. It lives briefly on the surface; a battle is fought. Curious and spellbound, I watch an amalgamation of forces crystallise — waves and ripples from within, a gentle blistering as it adjusts and forms. The structure holds. It dries and flattens to the canvas.

Fascinatingly it feels organic, and feels like a mystery I’m searching for. The long looking of the Romantics had a partial answer, the sublime could be awe inspiring and beautiful but there is also a quality that grips you more. Terror. The idea that you are insignificant in the face of this sheer magnificent scale. This webbing like structure is tiny but the minuscule empty spaces or cavities can give us a feeling of unease! Trypophobia is similar to that of a fear of snakes and is perfectly understandable. It has a function, “do not put your hand in that hole” or even better “do not lick that toad.”

The webbing’s hole patterns resemble the markings of some animals. That likeness, interestingly, speaks to the problem of the sublime. Art can keep both the beauty of the net and the unease of its openings — evocative of a nightmare, or of your wildest dreams.

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, each closed and slightly swollen, packed against one another so that what remains between them is a pale, continuous net, tight where the cells are small and opening into slower, thicker channels where the cells grow large. No cell is a perfect circle and no corridor is a straight road; each boundary is a negotiation, a place where one tendency to gather has been stopped by another tendency to spread, and the stop itself has become a line with thickness, a vein, a seam you could follow with a fingertip. What the field keeps, at every distance, is that double life. Looked at as structure it is thrifty and lawful — islands and the water between islands, bone and the marrow-space, leaf and the pale plumbing that feeds it. Looked at as sensation it is almost too complete. The cells crowd. The openings multiply. The same economy that builds a lung or a river-fan also builds a surface the body reads as puncture, pore, nest, a beauty that arrives with a flinch because the nervous system has met this handwriting on skin and stone and in the clustered dark of the sky.

Inherent to it is hierarchy without a ruler. At the edge the net is fine, almost dust, a frost of tiny rooms; toward the centre the rooms swell and the walls thicken, as if the same rule, given more time or more room, preferred fewer, larger silences. Inherent too is irregularity that is not accident. The cells vary, yet they vary inside a family; they refuse geometry and still refuse chaos. Nothing is repeated and everything rhymes.

That is why enlargement does not merely magnify. It tests whether the rhyme survives the change of scale — whether seen in the lichen on tree bark or a thunderous blast above. An ethereal mass, transcendent object at the end of time etched over the sky.

A garden that has years in it teaches a particular kind of authorship. As the gardener you do not get to be the origin. You arrive after the roots have opinions. What you learn is how to recognise a structure that is already thinking — how a leaf spends its water, how shade edits a slope, how a plant will find the crack in a fence and use it as a door. Painting is a little bit like gardening… you look and see what’s an error. Japanese bonsai is a 3D art that follows the rules but in living matter rather than 2D paint.

Gardens have already found their character; one does not invent on bare ground. With patience you can scatter seed. Prepare the soil and you could transplant a shrub. As a gardener the attention needed is to what is already underway. The studio is the same kind of looking, turned toward pigment and surface.

Every pattern you see — a zebra’s stripes, a sunflower’s spiral, the gaps between leaves in a forest canopy — is the same quiet rule running at a different speed. Two forces, one that gathers and one that checks, and between them the world invents itself.

Nature’s own method, made visible. The same logic that spaces the seeds in a daisy head is the logic that shapes a coastline, a river delta, the branching of a lung. One handwriting, repeated everywhere, at every scale.