Rewilding 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.
The artist Rebecca Howard devoted two years to visiting rewilding projects across England before spending a month painting each of nine large canvases that reveal what happens when people step back from intensive management of land and allow wild nature to take a leading role.
“I wanted to create a positive exhibition that people could view and feel empowered to do something of their own, and not feel totally overwhelmed by the challenges we face with our climate and biodiversity crisis,” said Howard. “If you walk into an art gallery you’re faced with seascapes or bluebell woods but you don’t often see a dead tree in a painting.”
Howard, whose exhibition opens at rewilded Knepp, West Sussex, on 12 September, began by visiting Cabilla, a fragment of Cornish temperate rainforest which is being restored and extended by the Thousand Year Trust charity founded by Merlin Hanbury-Tenison.
Over the following months, Howard explored renowned rewilding sites including the pioneering Knepp estate, which began the British rewilding movement, and the Devon farm turned back to nature by the outspoken rewilder Derek Gow, who has also overseen the reintroduction of beavers, storks and water voles to many sites across Britain.
But Howard was also invited into less widely known projects including, in Derby, the largest urban rewilding project in Britain, and Broughton Sanctuary, a North Yorkshire estate owned by the same family for more than 900 years that is taking a land-healing turn in the 21st century.
At all the sites she ended up painting, Howard discovered new kinds of land management and beauty that challenge conventional notions and customs.
At Hamatethy Farm, a rewilded hill farm in Cornwall, she found a huge beech tree that had most of its trunk chewed by resident beavers but was still standing. “It was a felled tree waiting to happen but there was something very beautiful about that stasis between a living and a dead tree,” she said. “You know it’s going to crash down at some point but it’s going to provide so much habitat when it does and it’s actually a beautiful object in the way it’s been gnawed. It’s exciting. I’m definitely on the side of seeing beauty in new ways.”
Howard, who chose the sites for their varied habitat, with each one also being a member of the Rewilding Britain charity’s network, was struck by the mix of private and charity landowners’ openness to change and openness to visitors like herself.
“Each of the sites were after the same thing – they wanted to increase the biodiversity of their place and get the most out of their land – but they were also all so keen to show me around. They came back to me with enthusiasm and openness, there was no agenda,” she said. “Walking around with them, there was this excitement – some had only been doing it for five years and already there was so much positive change: the coming back of lost species and the constant unknown quality to it, which might be a bit disconcerting to a lot of us.”
At Knepp, Howard studied the standing deadwood, a vital habitat for hundreds of invertebrates but one which has not been tolerated in recent centuries because dead trees have been cut down and tidied away, or more recently removed over health and safety fears.
At Moor Barton in Devon, she joined a group ring-barking non-native larch trees. “There was a sense of, ‘What are we doing killing things?’, but what we were doing was creating deadwood and removing these massive, fast-growing trees that were crowding out young oaks and birches. Give it a year and it will really benefit that land,” she said.
Each canvas is 120cm tall and 70cm wide. “When you’re standing in front of them they take up your whole vision. The idea is that you’re transported to that place and you get some sense of what it’s like to visit,” said Howard, who hopes the exhibition, which runs until 18 October at Knepp, will then tour other places in Britain.
Lia Brazier, the creative director at Knepp, said: “Rewilding needs to exist not only in our landscapes, but in our culture and imagination too, so we’re thrilled to be hosting this important body of work. Rebecca’s paintings offer a new way of seeing these changing landscapes, revealing the extraordinary diversity and abundance that can emerge when nature is given space to recover. We hope this work will inspire people to connect more deeply with nature and see the possibility of a wilder future as something not only tangible, but essential.”
Howard said art had a lovely way of drawing people in and that she “wanted to show the beauty of rewilding. I don’t have any land myself but as an artist I can raise awareness of the benefits of rewilding. It’s my gift to their cause.”
