In mythology, the Green Man is a Forest god, an emblem of the birth, death, and rebirth cycle of the natural year, and a symbol of human connection with nature.

The Green Man motif inspired me to imagine the human relationship with nature in a distant, forgotten past, drawing on Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

In keeping with my practice, I have used masks of my face and family, this time using projection and 3D printing.

As hunter-gatherers, we were part of nature for the first 300,000 years of our existence. But for the last 10,000 years, since the Neolithic Revolution, humans have been in conflict with nature.

The UK, for example, was covered in forest, but this was cleared, bit by bit, for cereal and livestock farming. Seventy years ago, after WWII, the destruction of nature in the UK accelerated dramatically in the service of increased productivity. Native Woodland now covers only 2.5% of the UK. The UK is ranked one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and Britain ranks bottom in Europe for nature connectedness.

Humans urgently need to reconnect with nature, to value it again, and allow nature, in all its wildness and chaos, back into the world.