A new art exhibition in West Sussex showcases the unexpected beauty of rewilding landscapes, challenging conventional ideas of English countryside aesthetics. Through two years of fieldwork and painting, the artist captures the vibrant, untamed scenes emerging from abandoned fields, beaver-dammed streams, and regrowing wetlands. The display features fungi on decaying wood, water buffalo in restored marshes, and the raw, earthy charm of muddy, overgrown terrain. Critics often dismiss such areas as chaotic, but the exhibition argues they hold a distinct, wild allure worth celebrating.
Rebecca Howard spent two years visiting projects and painting landscapes that feature in West Sussex exhibitionRewilding areas do not usually conform to traditional notions of beauty in England’s green and pleasant land. Detractors may bewail the beaver-felled trees, untidy scrub, deadwood, weeds, mud and “mess”.But a new exhibition highlights the aesthetic delights that can be discovered on rewilding sites where fungi grows on dying trees, water buffalo gather in new wetlands and brown-watered beaver pools flood once-desiccated fields. Continue reading...
