Rebecca Howard’s work seize a wilder Britain within the making. There’s nonetheless time to catch her exhibition at Knepp, celebrating 9 tasks bringing nature again from the brink
Saltmarsh is spreading again throughout the Ribble estuary on England’s north-west coast. In Cornwall, historic oaks stand inside one a fraction of one in every of Britain’s historic temperate rainforests. Elsewhere, land is being left, managed or reshaped to present wildlife an opportunity to return. These are the landscapes artist Rebecca Howard has spent the previous yr portray for A 12 months within the Wild, an exhibition that paperwork 9 UK rewilding tasks.
The works seize wildflower meadows in Yorkshire, beaver reintroduction in Devon, turtle dove conservation in Somerset and the restoration of saltmarsh in Lancashire. What unites them, Howard says, is a willpower to “carry again abundance of wildlife”.
“It’s been thrilling for me to see simply how shortly land can heal if solely it’s given the prospect,” she informed Optimistic Information.
She described herself as being “in awe” of the individuals she met working to revive the land. At Moor Barton in Devon, she painted a felled larch lined in porcelain mushrooms, impressed by the “fantastic thing about life coming from decay”. A private spotlight was seeing a merlin fly throughout the trail at Broughton Sanctuary in Yorkshire. Howard stated encounters like this, with animals and birds she had by no means seen earlier than, “simply aren’t potential in lots of locations”.
The exhibition runs till Sunday (18 October) at Knepp, the Sussex property whose personal rewilding experiment has turn into one in every of Britain’s best-known. Alongside the work, Howard is promoting a collection of playing cards and limited-edition prints, with proceeds supporting the Rewilding Britain charity.
As she put it: “Both by means of species reintroduction or cautious land administration, there may be nothing extra lovely than visiting a spot which is teeming with life.”
Discover out extra in regards to the exhibition right here
Primary picture: Knepp
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