Rebecca Howard’s paintings capture a wilder Britain in the making. There’s still time to catch her exhibition at Knepp, celebrating nine projects bringing nature back from the brink
Saltmarsh is spreading back across the Ribble estuary on England’s north-west coast. In Cornwall, ancient oaks stand within one a fragment of one of Britain’s ancient temperate rainforests. Elsewhere, land is being left, managed or reshaped to give wildlife a chance to return. These are the landscapes artist Rebecca Howard has spent the past year painting for A Year in the Wild, an exhibition that documents nine UK rewilding projects.
The works capture 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 determination to “bring back abundance of wildlife”.
“It’s been exciting for me to see just how quickly land can heal if only it is given the chance,” she told Positive News.
She described herself as being “in awe” of the people she met working to restore the land. At Moor Barton in Devon, she painted a felled larch covered in porcelain mushrooms, inspired by the “beauty of life coming from decay”. A personal highlight was seeing a merlin fly across the path at Broughton Sanctuary in Yorkshire. Howard said encounters like this, with animals and birds she had never seen before, “just aren’t possible in many places”.
The exhibition runs until Sunday (18 October) at Knepp, the Sussex estate whose own rewilding experiment has become one of Britain’s best-known. Alongside the paintings, Howard is selling a series of cards and limited-edition prints, with proceeds supporting the Rewilding Britain charity.
As she put it: “Either through species reintroduction or careful land management, there is nothing more beautiful than visiting a place which is teeming with life.”
Find out more about the exhibition here
Main image: Knepp
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