“In My Liverpool Home"
‘In My Liverpool Home’ is a contemporary botanical art collection exploring some of the most iconic and historic plant life from across the region. My series of paintings will be shown in 2025 taking the audience on a journey across Liverpool featuring historic and important specimens including Calderstone Park’s Ancient Allerton Oak, Sefton Meadows saved Horse Chestnut trees, The Sefton Park Palm House Hibiscus and Knowsley Hall’s Fig Tree. The collection will also feature multiple specimens from the Liverpool Botanical Trust plant collection at Croxteth Hall Walled gardens, including their incredible Green Jade Vine, Peach tree, Gingers, Orchids, Fuchsia, Guzmania berteroniana, Aechmea fasciata and Solonestomon from their National Collections. The paintings will be shown in a Liverpool based exhibition (location to be confirmed), to celebrate the diversity of the botanicals, the heritage and history of the specimens brought into the region and will highlight the importance of the plant collections and the work being done to secure their future.
The paintings reflect the style, clarity and detail of traditional botanical illustration to inform and inspire the audience, yet will offer a contemporary sense of realism both in the watercolour technique and the subject representation.
For example, I found that most of the specimens I sourced to be used as reference were rarely ‘perfect’ and I believe that rather than detract from their appeal, this infinite variation is what draws people back to nature. I believe that in today’s moment of prolific AI imagery, this draw to the grounding effect of nature is even more important and the very real historic connections to Liverpool’s past will give the audience a real sense of place and time. Hence my vision for the collection would be to capture each subject as I found them, how a branch hung, if a bramble was intertwined or if some leaves had been damaged or eaten. The subjects are meticulously painted in great detail to capture their precise form in my own hyper-realistic style but also be depicted in how one might find them within their habitat. My works seek to explore and accurately capture the three-dimensional structure, the weight and physics of the plant as well as a real focus on the surface qualities of each part of the structure.
The paintings will be exhibited in 2025 and will be not be available for purchase. The collection will be retained to be shared as a public resource in the Liverpool region. Limited edition giclee prints are available.
