The ground beneath us can appear still. A field, a forest floor or a bank of earth presents a surface: soil, stones, fallen leaves, perhaps the first emergence of a shoot. Yet below that visible plane, life is active on a scale that resists ordinary sight. Roots search and branch. Fungal threads extend through soil. Water moves through pores and fissures. Minerals weather, organic matter is broken down, and innumerable organisms participate in cycles of nourishment, decay and renewal.
This hidden activity has become an important subject for contemporary painting. Not because painters can provide a scientific diagram of the soil, but because abstraction can convey something that factual description alone cannot: the sensation of being connected to systems larger, older and more complex than ourselves. A line can behave like a root, a vein or a fungal filament. A layered surface can suggest geological time. A field of colour can move between the microscopic and the planetary.
At Gallery Les Bois, artists approach the earth through distinct visual and material languages. Caitlin Heffernan imagines subterranean networks and organic entanglement. Michelle Gagliano allows land, pigment and memory to enter the making of the work. John Sabraw transforms material recovered from damaged waterways into paintings that evoke sediment, flow and regeneration. Miranda Carter approaches ground as an atmospheric threshold shaped by weather, water and change. Together, their practices reveal that what lies beneath is not empty space. It is a living structure.
THE EARTH IS NOT A BACKGROUND
Western landscape traditions have often organised the natural world around a horizon: earth below, sky above, and the human viewer positioned before the scene. Paintings of hidden ecological systems disturb that arrangement. They ask us to imagine depth rather than distance and participation rather than observation. The ground is no longer a stable platform on which life happens. It is part of life’s active intelligence.
Soil is among the most biologically diverse habitats on Earth. It contains organisms visible to the eye and countless others that are not: bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, mites, insects and more. Their interactions contribute to nutrient cycling, water regulation, soil structure, plant health and the continuing transformation of organic matter. Roots belong within this ecology too. They alter their surroundings, form symbiotic relationships and connect the life above ground with the conditions below it.
Mycorrhizal fungi are one of the most compelling examples. Associated with the roots of most plant species, they can extend a plant’s effective reach for water and nutrients while receiving carbohydrates produced through photosynthesis. The relationships are intricate and varied. Popular accounts sometimes turn fungal networks into a simple story of trees consciously communicating or generously sharing resources. The scientific picture is more cautious and more interesting: exchanges occur, but their scale, direction and ecological effects depend on species, place and circumstance.
Painting is well suited to this uncertainty. It can hold knowledge and mystery together. It can acknowledge that a system is real without pretending that every relationship within it has been resolved. Rather than illustrating a settled answer, the work can create an imaginative space in which interdependence is felt.
CAITLIN HEFFERNAN AND THE UNSEEN WORLD
Caitlin Heffernan’s paintings occupy the territory between observation and imagination. Based in Brighton, she draws on ecology, mythology, natural history and the structures that exist beneath the visible world. Root systems, caves, wetlands, birds, forests and organic networks recur within her work, but they rarely settle into literal description. Forms emerge, overlap and transform, creating environments that feel simultaneously bodily, geological and alive.
In Entangled Thoughts, 2025, the title itself joins the inner life of the mind to the entanglement of natural systems. Pigments, sand, binder and chalks produce a materially varied surface. Marks appear to gather, branch, press against one another and move across different depths. The composition can suggest roots, mycelium, eroded earth or neural pathways without becoming an image of any one of them.
This ambiguity is essential. Heffernan does not use nature as a decorative vocabulary placed around human emotion. She asks whether the apparent boundary between human experience and ecological life is sustainable at all. The painting’s networked forms allow thought to be understood as relational: shaped by memory, place, other lives and the environments through which we move.
Her intuitive process mirrors this idea. Layers accumulate through discovery rather than the execution of a fully predetermined design. One mark changes the conditions for the next. Areas are covered, revealed, scraped or redirected. The work grows through response, resembling the adaptive systems that inspire it. This does not mean that the painting is uncontrolled. Intuition in a mature practice is a form of concentrated judgement, built through repeated decisions about balance, rhythm, density and restraint.
Heffernan’s unseen worlds resist didacticism. The viewer is not given a diagram of a fungal network or a prescribed environmental lesson. Instead, curiosity comes first. We are invited to look closely enough for separate forms to become relationships. That movement—from object to connection—is one of the painting’s most significant ecological propositions.
MICHELLE GAGLIANO: WHEN LAND BECOMES MATERIAL
Michelle Gagliano approaches the hidden life of the earth through material intimacy. Her atmospheric paintings are informed by landscape, weather, water, season and geological change, while her practice draws upon historical methods of preparing grounds, pigments and oils. Earth is both subject and source. It enters the work conceptually through the memory of place and physically through the materials from which colour is made.
Virginia Soil Journey Through Open Doors, 2024, makes that relationship explicit in its title. The phrase suggests movement between exterior landscape and interior experience, but it also points towards the earth as an active carrier of history. Soil is never simply brown matter. Its colour records mineral composition, organic life, water, climate and time. To work with earth pigments is to engage with a material whose appearance has already been shaped by processes extending far beyond the studio.
Gagliano’s layered surfaces often appear to hold traces of those processes. Translucent colour, mineral tones and partially obscured marks create depth without conventional perspective. The eye passes through the surface rather than merely across it. A passage may suggest sediment, weathered stone, water or vegetation, then shift towards pure colour as the viewer continues to look.
Historical knowledge is important here, but it is not used nostalgically. Handmade pigments and carefully chosen oils allow Gagliano to question the separation between image and material. The landscape is not represented with substances that have no relationship to it; the physical origin of colour becomes part of what the painting means. That coherence gives the work both visual richness and conceptual integrity.
The result is a form of abstraction grounded in reciprocity. The artist receives colour and material from the earth, transforms them through skill and attention, and returns them as an image that asks the viewer to notice the living systems from which artistic materials emerge. Sustainability is not added as a message after the painting is complete. It is present in the structure of the practice.
JOHN SABRAW: GEOLOGY, DAMAGE AND REGENERATION
John Sabraw’s paintings connect geological material to environmental action. In collaboration with scientists and engineers, iron oxide is recovered during the remediation of streams affected by acid mine drainage and refined into stable artist pigment. A substance associated with industrial damage becomes colour, and the material history of the landscape enters the painting directly.
Sabraw’s abstractions often move between scales. Flowing bands and cellular forms can evoke aerial landscapes, mineral deposits, river systems or microscopic structures. Works incorporating Appalachian coal and recovered iron-oxide pigment bring the geology of extraction into the image, but the compositions are not illustrations of a mine or a polluted stream. They create visual fields in which matter appears to circulate, divide and reform.
This movement is particularly significant because geology is often imagined as inert. Rock and mineral processes occur over spans of time that exceed human experience, while industrial extraction imposes a very different speed. Sabraw’s work places those timescales in tension. Ancient material, recent damage, scientific remediation and contemporary painting meet on the same surface.
The environmental account is important, but it does not replace artistic judgement. Sabraw’s paintings depend on colour, composition, scale and technical control. Their regenerative meaning becomes compelling because it is carried by ambitious visual form. Beauty draws the viewer towards the material story, and the material story changes how that beauty is understood.
For collectors, this inseparability matters. The work is not sustainable because it depicts an ecological theme; its material origin is connected to a real remediation process. At the same time, the painting must continue to succeed as a painting. Its potential long-term significance rests on the convergence of innovation, documented practice, aesthetic force and wider critical engagement.
MIRANDA CARTER AND THE AWAKENING GROUND
Miranda Carter’s Waking Ground, 2025, offers another way of approaching the earth’s hidden life. The title suggests that the land is not dormant but entering visibility. Painted with non-toxic oil paint and mixed media on FSC-certified wood and recycled canvas, the work places material care alongside an atmospheric engagement with landscape.
Carter’s paintings are shaped by light, weather, deep water and shifting horizons. Yet ground in her work is rarely a fixed boundary. It can dissolve into mist, moisture or reflection, making the distinction between earth, water and sky uncertain. This instability reflects ecological reality: landscapes are made through movement. Water enters soil, erodes rock, transports minerals and supports growth. Weather alters what can live, and living systems alter the ground in return.
In Waking Ground, restraint gives the painting its intensity. Tonal shifts and softened transitions allow the landscape to emerge gradually. The work does not reveal a hidden root or organism, but it changes our sense of the land from object to process. The ground seems capable of memory, saturation and renewal.
Such atmospheric painting asks for patience. Its meaning is not concentrated in a single symbol. It develops as relationships between colour, edge and depth become apparent. Carter’s lower-impact material choices reinforce this slower attention. They suggest that care for landscape can be expressed both through what is painted and through the decisions that make painting possible.
FROM SCIENTIFIC IMAGE TO ARTISTIC IMAGINATION
Contemporary audiences are surrounded by extraordinary images of the invisible: microscope photographs, satellite data, geological scans, root maps and digital models of fungal growth. These technologies expand knowledge, but painting does something different. It does not compete with scientific evidence. It translates the emotional and philosophical consequences of that evidence into material experience.
When we learn that soil is densely inhabited, the ground changes conceptually. When we understand that plant and fungal lives are joined through exchange, individuality becomes less absolute. When mineral colour is traced to a damaged stream or a particular landscape, pigment ceases to be neutral. Painting can hold these changes in perception without reducing them to information.
Abstraction is crucial because ecological systems rarely offer a single, stable image. They involve flows, feedback, competition, cooperation, disturbance and recovery. An abstract painting can sustain several of these conditions at once. It can make density and openness, growth and decay, beauty and damage coexist within one visual field.
This multiplicity also requires critical care. Network metaphors are seductive, and art can easily romanticise them. Not every connection is benevolent; ecosystems contain predation, parasitism and unequal exchange as well as mutual support. The strongest paintings do not turn nature into a moral fable. They preserve complexity and allow wonder to coexist with uncertainty.
HOW TO LOOK AT PAINTINGS OF HIDDEN SYSTEMS
For a collector or viewer, the first encounter should remain visual. Where does the eye enter the work? Do forms appear to grow, drift, fracture or bind together? Does the surface feel shallow or deep? Which marks seem structural, and which behave like events? These questions reveal how the painting constructs a sense of life without needing to identify every form.
Material information can then deepen the encounter. Sand, chalk, earth pigment, recovered iron oxide, responsibly sourced support and recycled canvas each behave differently. They create particular textures, absorb or reflect light, and carry histories of extraction, preparation and use. Understanding these histories can illuminate the artist’s decisions, but materials should not become a checklist detached from quality.
The durability of the work also matters. Collectors should ask how experimental or handmade materials have been prepared, bound and documented; what conservation advice accompanies them; and how the artist’s practice has developed across time. Responsible collecting joins curiosity with stewardship. It values the conceptual origin of a material while also attending to the physical future of the object.
Potential investment-worthiness cannot be guaranteed by an ecological narrative or an unusual pigment. It emerges, if at all, through sustained artistic achievement, distinctive authorship, provenance, condition, exhibition and collection history, and continuing critical relevance. In the strongest work, environmental responsibility intensifies rather than substitutes for artistic merit.
LEARNING TO SEE BENEATH THE SURFACE
The hidden life of the earth changes the meaning of landscape. A tree is no longer only trunk, branch and leaf; it is also root, symbiosis, water and soil. A river is not only a visible current; it is sediment, geology, contamination and repair. A painted ground is not simply a surface on which an image rests. It can become a record of material origin, ecological relationship and time.
Heffernan, Gagliano, Sabraw and Carter make these ideas visible without closing them down. Heffernan gives form to entanglement and unseen habitat. Gagliano joins earth, pigment and memory through layered material practice. Sabraw makes environmental damage and regeneration inseparable from colour. Carter reveals ground as an atmospheric process rather than a static boundary.
Their paintings remind us that visibility is not the same as importance. Much of what sustains the living world operates outside ordinary attention. Art cannot expose every root, organism or exchange, nor should it pretend to. What it can do is cultivate the imaginative readiness to recognise that the surface is never the whole story.
To look beneath the earth in painting is therefore also to look differently at ourselves: not as isolated observers standing above a passive world, but as participants within systems of material, dependence and change. The ground holds more life than we can see. These paintings ask us to meet that fact with curiosity, care and wonder.
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