Of Gardens Long Run Wild: John Caple

I hoped to produce a series of paintings which would explore a relationship to both nature and mystery. In a world in which we can feel increasingly disenchanted from the earth, I wanted to think about the search for re-enchantment and a simpler wildness within us. It is perhaps that small wilderness within that shapes our relationship to the macrocosm, and so ultimately shapes the world we live in. I looked to poetry hoping to find insight and was immediately drawn to Queen Mab by Percy Shelley. A visionary poem, seen as revolutionary when it was published, the importance of nature remains at the very heart of Queen Mab throughout its length. It describes for me a nature that is at once both simple and profound, pragmatic and mysterious, where hope is a fragile beauty that we each hold within our hands.