WHAT IS WILD?

12th Nov - 10th Dec 2026

Silian Gallery, London

What does it mean to be wild in a culture that has become accustomed to controlling the natural world? In What Is Wild?, Kimi Zoet explores this question through a new body of paintings informed by visits to rewilding landscapes and conversations with ecologists. The project began with a deceptively simple question: “What is a healthy tree?” Zoet's first painted response depicted a tree that appeared full, upright and carefully maintained. When an ecologist challenged this image as manicured rather than truly wild, it prompted her to look again. Visits to sites including Knepp and the Ealing Beaver Project opened up a different way of seeing: crooked, fallen, dead and dying trees were not signs of decline, but vital parts of a living ecosystem, providing habitats for insects, beetles and birds. Zoet began to understand ecological health not as a fixed state of perfection, but as a condition of participation: being part of a wider network of life, where decay makes way for new growth and there are no clear beginnings or endings. As she puts it, “mess is good.” This developing understanding is reflected in the paintings themselves. The earlier outdoor works, characterised by vibrant blues and expressive, joyful responses to the landscape, gradually give way to deeper, richer tones. Through studio experiments with paint, allowing it to drip, soak and settle into the surface, Zoet begins to explore decay and transformation. The paintings increasingly embrace the relationship between death and new life, from the regeneration of felled trees to the small, emerging forms of seedlings and leaves. Rather than seeing these processes as separate, Zoet comes to recognise them as part of the same ongoing cycle.

For Zoet, these questions extend beyond the countryside into the streets of London, where wildness can be found in weeds pushing through pavement cracks, abandoned gardens and ivy reclaiming neglected buildings. Beneath the carefully maintained surfaces of the city, natural processes continue, waiting for the opportunity to emerge. As she observes, “The tarmac is such a small veneer that keeps the soil at bay, and as soon as we stop pruning it, it will crack open.” The impulse to prune, tidy and control nature becomes a way of thinking about our relationship with ourselves, too: the pressure to suppress what grows unexpectedly, to maintain an image of order and to resist change. Through her paintings, and the process of learning to see through an ecologist's eyes, Zoet invites us to reconsider what we understand as healthy, beautiful or valuable, and what might become possible if we allowed the world around us, and ourselves, a little more room to grow wild.