This piece began as a series of daily sketches made in October 2025 for #pinktober. At the time, I was drawing instinctively — responding to ideas of damage, fragility, and the uneasy relationship between human presence and the natural world.
Those drawings later became three paintings for the Seeds of Hope exhibition at the VC Gallery in Pembroke Dock, South Wales: Still Eden?, Things Fell Apart, and Peaceful Oasis.
Each painting was created on a recycled canvas previously used for teaching. Rather than starting from a blank surface, I worked over what was already there, allowing earlier marks and layers to remain visible. The materials themselves became part of the meaning — carrying traces of past use, correction, and repetition.
The works also incorporate thermochromic pigments that shift from purple to pink when warmed, along with wildflower seeds sealed into the surface. There is a possibility — not a guarantee — that if the paintings are eventually discarded and broken down, something living might emerge from them.
This video is an extension of that process.
I began experimenting with animation using AI as a way of exploring what these painted environments might feel like if they could move — if the cracks could deepen, the colour could shift, and the landscape could continue beyond the still image. The intention wasn’t to replace the paintings, but to sit alongside them: another layer, another way of looking.
The soundtrack was written in response to the work, influenced in part by Nothing But Flowers by Talking Heads — a song that imagines a world reclaimed by nature, where the result is both beautiful and quietly unsettling.
Across the paintings and the video, the same question remains:
What happens after damage?
What continues without us?
And what, if anything, might still grow.
Click the link below to see the full video on YouTube
ninacamplin.co.uk 