Living in the inner city isn’t what it used to be. Thanks to city planners with a sense for trees and public gardens, featureless streetscapes and scorching black asphalt have been transformed, little by little, over the past 20 years into urban woodlands.

The exhibition works are created as a celebration of my own experiences of the particular urban woodland in which I live. The plants are generally exotic, as is the landscape that supports them and is created by them. The materials are drawn from parks and public spaces of all sorts – places where plants flourish and share the world with us. In turn, these plants create mini-worlds of shade, shelter and food for other creatures to “hang in there” as they witness all that humans do and are in the city environment. The circle/oval form is an ancient one. Inspired by the Zen thought directed in the creation of an enso (a circle made of a single stroke), the works centred on this form are a manifestation of my contemplation and appreciation of the immediate non-human world. They allude to wreaths of honour and victory, triumph in the face of relentless opposition. They are also eyes for we cannot pretend that what we do is unseen, and not affecting the rest of the biosphere. The other forms recall and acknowledge the original indigenous inhabitants of my neighbourhood and city – those who used the plants of their woodland in other ways and for other means than that which has followed them.