Heavitree Park: Gathering Creative Energy

This exhibition brings together a new series of artworks made using materials gathered from Heavitree Park in Exeter.

Working with oak galls, plant matter and other found elements, each piece is created using pigments and inks derived directly from the landscape itself. The process is slow and responsive, shaped by what is available, seasonal, and often overlooked.

Rather than depicting the park from a distance, these works are made with it. They hold traces of its cycles: growth, decay, transformation, and renewal. Marks are formed through a dialogue between material and hand, where the character of each ingredient, its density, tone, and unpredictability, plays an active role in the final image.

Exhibited at Park Life Café, just moments from where many of these materials were gathered, the work offers an invitation to pause and look more closely at a familiar place. To notice what might usually go unseen. To consider the park not just as a backdrop to daily life, but as a source of creative regeneration, living system of relationships, processes and quiet energies.

This series marks a period of reflection and return, an exploration of what it means to work with what is close at hand, and to let place shape both process and outcome.