BREATHE

July 2026

Twisted Festival, Wiltshire

Breathe is an installation exploring the symbiosis between nature and the human form.

The Dutch philosopher and ecologist Matthijs Schouten speaks of not believing in the concept of “nature,” but rather in a community of life. I feel this idea sits at the heart of the work.

Visually, the installation brings the human-made and the living world into direct conversation. Constructed across two blinds - objects associated with interiors, architecture and the boundaries of domestic space - the work carries the language of the built environment into the woodland. Against this manufactured surface, forms resembling lungs and shrubs emerge, while the movement of air through the installation evokes the act of breathing itself.

The lungs resemble shrubs; the wind moves like breath. These visual and physical parallels suggest that what we often perceive as separate — the human body, the forest, the air that surrounds us — is in fact part of the same living system. We participate in the same cycles of birth, life and death, and yet we have created a culture that places us increasingly at a distance from these processes, as though we exist apart from the living world.

By situating a distinctly human-made structure within a woodland, Breath brings these two seemingly opposing environments together. The blinds become a kind of threshold between the constructed world and the living world, while the organic forms begin to dissolve that boundary.

Installed as part of a festival exhibition, Breathe offered a quiet invitation to those passing by: to stop, to breathe, to become present, and to remember that we are not separate from the community of life, but participants within it.