Building on my PhD working with children picturing trees and in collaboration with the Forestry Commission, these most recent paintings touch upon the need to reconnect children with the natural world—to rewild childhood at a time when outdoor play is increasingly replaced by screens, structure, and limited access to wild spaces. I paint observing my children and from memories of those early, unbounded experiences in nature: places where mud, water, light, and movement formed an open landscape for imagination. These remembered terrains become semi-abstract environments where colour and gesture flow instinctively, echoing the way children encounter the world with curiosity rather than caution.

Rewilding childhood, to me, means loosening the boundaries that separate children from land, spontaneity, and discovery. Just as ecological rewilding allows natural processes to lead, rewilding the imagination invites children to shape their own relationships with the living world—messy, exploratory, and immersive. My paintings inhabit this threshold between memory and possibility, where nature is vibrant, unpredictable, and full of agency.

By creating fluid, sensory spaces rather than literal depictions, I hope to evoke the feeling of stepping into a landscape that is both familiar and strange—an invitation to pay attention again.

These works ask what becomes possible, for children and adults alike, when we restore a sense of wonder and belonging within the natural world