Long Live the Weeds and Wilderness

 

Exhibition proposal for Peggy Jay Gallery, Burgh House, May 2026

 

Long Live the Weeds and Wilderness exhibition features large scale drawings and paintings of wild flowers and weeds, highlighting the strength and beauty and the fragile vulnerability of wildflower plants. Often overlooked as straggly or invasive, these plants are shown individually, allowing the beauty of their structures—the arrangement of leaves and flowers along each stem—to come into focus.

 

 

I draw wildflowers larger than life, seeking to celebrate the majestic and foreground smaller plants and less prized plants and weeds. In each drawing, the plant’s roots are exposed, revealing their source of life and energy and, paradoxically, their vulnerability and fragility. I work loosely in charcoal, aiming to capture life and movement and passage through time, as the plant begins to wilt and die over the duration of the drawing. 

 

The show will be mainly comprised of framed charcoal drawings. But also included will be studies of plants rendered in oil paint on canvas and plywood.

 

The title for the show comes from the last line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Inversnaid, written in 1881, in which he celebrates the goodness and beauty of the ordinary world and asks what would the world be like without this taken for granted mountain stream and its surrounding wilderness?

 

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.