The amazing similarities between our neural networks and patterns found in nature such as the interlaced branches of woodlands and the root systems of plants, are the inspiration for Mind:Matter, by Rachael Plummer.

Rachael’s studio in Lewes looks out over a verdant treescape of willow, beech, sycamore, and ash with a wood pigeon’s nest at its heart. Her work in Mind: Matter reflects this web of branches and explores how interconnected patterns exist both in nature and in our bodies. She describes this as ‘neural networks and tree fretwork’.

In pieces that are neither wholly abstract, nor entirely figurative, she teases out the similarities between the human brain with its nervous system and the tangled roots of a sprouting bean; between an image of the sense receptors of a dog and the skeletal branches of the willows seen from her window. She compares the shape of a nest to the solar plexus, the name given to the complex network of nerves in the abdomen. She says: “This show has crystallised the kind of painter I am in relation to the landscape. I’ve always felt the sense that we’re not so separate, we’re made of the same stuff.”

Earlier cultures had a sense of interconnectedness to nature we have lost, she believes, and there is a gentle but insistent message in her work that it is only by rediscovering this connection that we will stop damaging the world around us. “It’s only when we think we have dominion over everything, when there’s a separation, that there’s harm. Once you recognise a connection then perhaps a compassionate approach to the environment comes naturally.”

On a macro level, the networks suggested by her paintings also bring to mind the journeys people take through landscape. There are echoes of her own transient childhood moving between the Channel Islands and Shropshire to Greece. Her mother now lives in the Canary Islands and when she visits she spends her time in the garden. The bright colours of the bougainvillea growing there features in some of her paintings. Another inspiration are the mountains of Andalucía where goat tracks and pilgrim paths become a fretwork of relationship with the landscape.

Rachael has lived and worked in Lewes since the 1990s, after studying in Brighton. Her work has always been inspired by nature, but recently she has moved from painting in acrylics to using pure pigment mixed with environmentally friendly thinner, as well as linseed and walnut oil. Detail is added with the use of an alloy metallic leaf. Her method is to start with observation, which through mark making coalesces into form, capturing the fleeting energy of nature. “I think we’re all working from our nervous systems. If I’m fired up about something that comes through in the work. If I breathe first, then there’s an open creative approach that widens the scope, it isn’t a dominion, it’s an ebb and flow, a mutual ecology…”