Description

Sitting in the beast is the first of the limited edition works developed in tandem with the large, acrylic painting, Mother Tree, exploring connected ideas within a work. It is created by digitally drawing over images of the original painting in progress and some digital montage.

The Sentience series was inspired by walking in a forest during a Vipassana meditation course.
‘Mother Tree’ is somewhat inspired by Susan Simard’s book, ‘Finding the Mother Tree’, and is about how the mother tree in a forest gives all her last energy to the surrounding plants, almost as her last gift, an inheritance. Sitting in the beast is a tangental thought related to connecting with the secret life of the forest via meditation.

There has been extensive research into the sentience in plant life, highlighted, for example, in books by Monica Gagliano, Suzanne Simard, Merlin Sheldrake and Peter Wohlleben, which indicates that the conversations continue both through the air, via scents, and underground via the fungal networks. My works are attempts at expressing the interconnectedness of all things and the constant conversations that go on in the background, all around us.