Deep in Nature proposes that sustainability involves cultivating relationships and consciousness in how we engage with the Earth’s resources.
Through live performance painting, I explore how attentiveness, deep listening and improvisation transform relationships between bodies, materials and the environment. The performance took place during the RCA Painting Show in June 2026. I created the painting blindfolded as a graphic score for cello, electric guitar, clarinet and live electronics. Using Contact Improvisation, the Meisner Technique and Jungian Active Imagination, I use painting as an act of transmission and broadcast medium. The score also included a poem I wrote from a recent dream in which I was surrounded by birds, animals, a river and thick grass, creating an atmospheric and thematic framework.
Improvisation requires attunement, reciprocity and vitality - dynamic qualities that shape our earliest experiences of life and form a basis for our experience of art. This connects to Tim Ingold’s understanding of sustainability as maintaining the conditions that allow life to continue. For me, improvisation practises this: by listening, responding and adapting, each action creates the conditions for the next, allowing the work to evolve rather than fixing it into a predetermined form.
I also draw on Jane Bennett’s ideas of the vitality of matter - that agency can emerge through relationships between human and nonhuman forces. The body, sound, paint, canvas, time and space are all active participants. I understand painting as an ecological process; a reciprocal interaction between the painter as a living organism, the material of the paint as an active agent and the surrounding environment producing an evolving ecology of attention, shaped by an aesthetics of imperfection and cyclicity.
I extend this philosophy of agency and vitality of materials through my use of ground pigments made from earth, stone, graphite and metals, hand-washed linseed oil, and recycled stretcher bars and canvas, often using both sides and building layers over time.
Deep in Nature suggests that ecological transformation begins with learning to relate more deeply - to one another, the natural world, materials, and the irreducibly human processes through which art is created.
I am coming to the end of a magnificent and intense year on the MA Painting programme at the Royal College of Art, and would be delighted to invite you to the RCA Graduation Show at Hester Road in Battersea.
The exhibition brings together work from across the School of Arts & Humanities. Over the past year I have delved deeply into my practice, and I am excited to share the work with you.
