Creator OF THE MONTH

PHOEBE SLEATH PhD student, artist & Mountain Leader

Where geology and creativity collide, Phoebe can be found studying the language of landscape through field paintings

PHOEBE SLEATH didn’t “grow up outdoorsy” and can recall many days resolutely remaining inside rented family holiday cottages on Arran and in Lakeland. Now, it’s hard to imagine the 27-year-old climber and hillwalker was ever more at home on the sofa than the crags and corries of our high places. The tide turned in her teenage years on a sunny Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold day on Pen y Fan, Phoebe tells The Great Outdoors, where her love of nature and landscape was born.

With adulthood looming, Phoebe’s passion drove her educational choices, too. Upon arriving at university to study Geography, she signed up to every outdoor club. Phoebe has always preferred adventure with friends over going solo, and “sharing skills is integral to the club mechanism.” This would naturally pave the way to her training as a Mountain Leader later in life, allowing her to encourage others into the outdoors after her own journey into climbing posed its own difficulties, struggles and fragilities.

Likewise, the classroom initially proved problematic and Phoebe was “a bit overwhelmed by the maths-driven course”. On her first field trip to Pembrokeshire, she realised how visual geology is, and here she began painting the rocks.

“Science is inherently creative because it is the documenting of information from the perspective of an observer and reveals so much about our biases,” she muses, pointing to the importance of interpretation in the natural sciences due to the “infinite scale of noise” within the detail of our landscapes.

Phoebe usually sketches or paints during lu