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Feeling through nature

  • Series
Mixed media collage artwork using a combination of two different photographic prints. The background of the collage is made up of a black and white photograph of the head of a young woman with long dark hair. She is looking off to camera left with a neutral expression on her face. Overlaid on top of her portrait, running through the centre of the image, are horizontal strips of a colour photograph showing a large expanse of open water with the ripples on the surface of the water visible through the light and dark reflections. The horizontal strips are spaced out such that the portrait beneath can be seen through the gaps.
The Water. © Faye Heller for Wellcome Collection.

Nature writer and founder of The Willowherb Review, Jessica J Lee invited contributors to explore the connection between the natural world and wellbeing. The resulting essays range over subjects including gardening, homesickness, hiking, assault, healing, wildness, domestication, overlooked creatures and neglected landscapes. Nature here proves to be anything but a straightforward solace: instead it is a place of mixed emotions, painful recovery, reclaimed knowledge and unexpected beauty.

About the contributors

Black and white photograph of Jessica J Lee

Jessica J Lee

Author

Jessica J Lee is an environmental historian and author of two books of nature writing, ‘Turning’ (2017) and ‘Two Trees Make a Forest’ (2019). She has written for the Guardian, Catapult, the Times Literary Supplement and BBC Radio 4. She is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review.

Black and white, head and shoulders portrait of Faye Heller.

Faye Heller

Artist

Faye Heller studied for her MA in Fine Art at the Slade School, University College London, UK and is a qualified teacher. She has been making artwork for over 25 years and her work was shown at the Tate Modern on a late night for the Dora Maar exhibition in 2020. Using handmade photomontage and collage, she combines portraiture with the natural and man-made landscape, exploring the psychological and environmental, and evoking layers of time, landscape, places and encounters.