Small Silent Voices (2024) is a project exploring landscape, botanical life, and geological time. I travelled from the chalk hills of southern England to Glenelg in the Scottish Highlands, where I encountered some of the oldest rocks on Earth: Lewisian gneiss and Moine schist.
The work traces a geographical and temporal journey, from relatively young chalk landscapes to ancient metamorphic formations. Building on my previous project, Come, See Real Flowers of This Painful World (2020), walking, observing, and fieldwork form the foundation of my practice. I cultivated a small ericaceous garden at my South Downs studio, growing species in soil very different from their native habitats. This experiment acted as both ecological inquiry and quiet performance, raising questions about human impulses to relocate, contain, and aestheticise nature.
In the Highlands, I photographed rock surfaces to capture folds, lines, and textures shaped by tectonic activity. These studies informed simple graphite drawings and folded paper works painted with pigment matched to the local rock. The painted papers became backdrops for portraits of wildflowers, connecting biological growth with geological processes.
The title comes from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain: “In the mountains, I see flowers like a thousand small, silent voices, each one part of a vast harmony.” The idea of small voices, quietly connected to something much larger, sits at the heart of this work. Wildflowers, like the folds in paper and in the land, speak of place, movement, and time. They are not merely decorative but integral witnesses to transformation, born of soil and stone, shaped by wind and water, and dependent on long environmental histories.
In this series I draw visual and conceptual links between botanical illustration, geological mapping, and lived experience. The creases in paper recall worn maps, archival pages, and field guides, bearing the marks of use and human connection to the land. Just as ancient rock retains the memory of past collisions, the folded paper records the gestures of the hand. It is both structure and mark, process and result, inviting closer attention to the systems that shape the visible world and to how landscapes, rocks, and plants endure and shape us in return.
Fold markings, 2023 (graphite and paper)
This project was made possible by the kindness of Turadh, which offers spaces of rest, reflection, and renewal to all those working for the common good in Scotland.
Meadowsweet ii, Tormentil, Rowan, Cross leaved heath, Welsh poppy, Valerian, Foxglove, Meadowsweet, Red clover, Eyebright, Bog Asphodel, Greater Birdfoot trefoil, Spotted heath orchid