This rewilding exhibition is an event that hopes to help people re-engage and connect with nature. 12 professional artists from the UK were invited to see the results of the project and create artwork in response to what they witnessed. explains his enchanting experience whilst there
Jake Spicer
MORE THAN ITS APPEARANCE, it is the sounds which first mark the Knepp Estate as different to the neighbouring countryside. As the morning sun casts a shadow play of meadow grasses upon the diffuse green canopy of my tent, I awake to an orchestral crescendo of birdsong. The familiar trills and warbles of a rural dawn chorus take on a palpable expression in a landscape that has been reclaimed by nature over the past 20 years, with rare turtle doves and nightingales adding their voices to the sounds of more familiar birds.
Blearily clambering from my sleeping bag, I’m greeted by the Oxfordshire-based illustrator Lisa Curtis at the entrance of the neighbouring tent, while the Welsh printmaker Marian Haff already has a yellow enamel kettle steaming on a camping stove. It is 5 am on a cold, clear May morning in 2023 and we have been gathered from the corners of the UK by the sculptor James Ort to respond to the rewilding project here at Knepp. Fresh from the campsite, clutching sketchbooks and flasks of hot tea, we are met by Knepp’s resident ecologist Penny Green, who leads us out into the Sussex wilderness.
The low mists of a cold spring morning hang in the air; they are like wool caught on the trailing brambles which grow in ragged domes around the once clear arable fields. Penny points out the oak sapling rising through the middle of a stand of briars, which forms a natural defence from the herbivores which roam freely on the 3,500-acre estate. The animals introduced here have been chosen to mirror the historic species that would have grazed a pre-agricultural Britain; Exmoor ponies in place of the European wild horse, longhorn cattle in place of the auroch, and free-roaming Tamworth pigs in lieu of wild boar, alongside red and roe deer. Although similar to the Sussex farmland of my youth, here the neat delineations of fields are obscured by the head-high stands of the scrubland habitat, with each copse or briar patch potentially masking the huge fauna that graze and rootle between them.
Fanned out around our guide, the gathered artists each look at the landscape through the lens of their own chosen subject matter – landscape painter Hester Berry is busy record
