Peering through the irregular hole of my sweater - the collaboration of moths and the totality of my negligence - I admire the new window to my chest. On my body it presents a clearing, a feeling of vulnerability almost entirely self inflicted. Like a parting in a canopy, or a city that builds itself in the wild, we might initially centralise these aberrations, care for - concern and fret over them because it is the only thing we know. In the shade, we wish for more sun and then we clear the trees to search for it - or as our cities require more and more room, we believe our only option is to expand. In dirt squares along motorways, nature must follow our invitation, to make its brief appearances at the expense of the time and resources of our suburban gardeners and city planners. New buildings shoot up over night, covered in green walls and garden pavilions suspended in air. They offer the idea of coexistence, and yet these mediations between human interaction and nature are usually framed as uniquely innovative, even unprecedented.
'Unprecedented' - the word rings on the news, it makes a researcher from the arctic shake his head and staring through the camera defeated he reports the salient finding: 'this word has lost all meaning'. In their situation they realise it's time to retire as scientists, perhaps instead preferring an occupation in armchair linguistics, hoping to find something in our language that would inspire an appropriate amount of interest or outcry. They become our century's great orators, with poems of melting ice caps and rainforests without rain; poems of the unprecedented, or whatever that might start to mean.
In a time when the persistence of nature ideologically opposes an extractive modernity, Neva Hosking's Behind the wheel, in front of the storm, explores the dilemma of escapism. In her drawings there is a lushess, of the rich and unending flora of the far North, followed by an understanding of nature's conditional form, and of our environmental situations that have made these scenes finite. Her drawings break through the desire to transform the natural space through a sense of ownership or development, instead centering quiet observation as the guiding form for her works. On the surface they might speak to an ephemerality, but such a concept so closely tied to the 'unique' reduces the way beauty exists through Neva's frame of viewing. By undoing the desire to inherently time the elapsing moments of a collective body uninterested in human progress, beauty exists not as a fleeting spectacle, but as something that returns, transforms and endures. For in a day a forest might see the ground littered with dead leaves and fallen trees, but then somewhere a flower is budding and without desire for fanfare, without beginning or end, it repeats.
This pattern does not exist separately to people, and that by drawing on vintage paper - relics of old political campaigns, unsigned contracts, and expired building forms, Neva inspires a distinct dialogue between the past and current moment. It bends our history and the legacy of human impact towards the cycle of endless recurrence, revealing how our actions have fundamentally changed our ability to observe. These counterpoints and the interplay of nature superseding the manmade, stirs a curiosity and a longing for closeness that is not 'unprecedented' but acknowledges our impact. It makes us look, not in passive or vapid admiration, but as an extension of growing.
Ironically, when individuals strive to lower their carbon emissions, they will inevitably find that living within densely populated cities lowers their carbon footprint. We might take away from this that abstaining - even isolating ourselves from nature, is the only way we can hope to preserve it, and that to 'escape' the city, means trespassing on the wellbeing of nature as our host. I wonder, if instead we should question how our built environments have alienated us, so that we are unable to do as the rest of life does? How within cities, our curiosity and relationship to nature are so structurally discouraged, that it has made observers like Neva, who immerse themselves in the coexistence and continuation of the environment, a minority?
In her work, the quiet persistence of nature is not a lesson in our dominance or even our stewardship over the environment, but of the urgency for us to participate and belong to it. She acknowledges very strongly how the environment compels her to capture, and signing each work with a four-leaf clover, she cedes authorship to nature. Like the moths that carve patterns into forgotten sweaters, nature quietly shapes and reclaims, weaving its narrative alongside ours. These small disruptions-holes, clearings, wilted leaves-are not fractures but evidence of a shared resilience essential to our existence. Neva Hosking offers this glimpse into her world of burgeoning green, an intense abundance seldom seen in the city, so that we too can bear witness.
'The hurricane blew me back down to Sydney but I hope to be back, no place like it."
