A Natural Paradox

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. - Rumi

Our relationship with the wild world is paradoxical: we seek it, but we do not necessarily see it. This tension between seeking and seeing beauty, as captured by the Sufi Mystic poet Rumi, is far from new. Since ancient times and across continents, there has been an intense relationship between creators and the environment, providing a vision of how the world has been understood, and prompting us to question the boundaries between what we see and what we wish to see.

These boundaries are at the core of Betsy Green's and Eileen Neff's art practices, demarcating divisions between nature and the man-made, the real and the imaginary. Their works present the junctions where these boundaries meet, allowing the spectator to walk through nature-based—and yet imaginary—scenarios, while simultaneously considering their own relationship with the natural world.

The works included in A Natural Paradox reveal scenarios devoid of human presence yet invite viewers to step into them and inhabit the worlds that the artists have created. Betsy Green's mystical and saturated landscapes possess an otherworldly quality. Yet at the heart of her images lie the shapes of the landscape that she originally photographed. In Terra Nullius (2020), one encounters the magnificent form of the butte formations of Monument Valley, a landscape that has struck many as a natural wonder. Green intensifies this effect by capturing a specific light—low to the horizon—which encourages the colour negative film to render the sky green, enhancing the overwhelming emotional magnitude of the landscape, and engendering emotions of both marvel and dread, also described as Sublime.

No works delve into the boundaries between nature and the human-made with so much playfulness and smart simplicity as Eileen Neff's. In Self Shelf (2024), Neff pictures a persimmon tree trunk that she had photographed and mounted floor-to-ceiling on her studio wall. A small shelf, positioned across the trunk within the mounted image, holds a miniature version of that same photograph. The resulting Self Shelf captures this layered composition—a disorienting mise en abyme merging nature with domesticity. Rather than revealing its construction, the final photograph creates a trompe-l'œil that destabilises viewers, leaving them dizzy before layers of reality that defy spatial logic except within the imaginary world they inhabit.

Green's and Neff's works are close enough to reality for us to recognise them, but removed enough to be believably unreal. Timeless, realistic, and engaging, they prompt the beholder to wonder where they are and where they stand in these worlds where nature and fantasy are one. Photography appears as a vehicle for considering our relationship with the natural world. It is used in the hands of these two artists as a tool to open up new spaces, but the way they use photography as a medium is in itself a distinguishable element of their practices.

Betsy Green is an alchemist and an explorer. The works on view feature landscapes that she has thoroughly researched, then photographed with a nineteenth-century portable field plate camera. Photography becomes a canvas that light and analogue film are enriched with colour, revealing aspects of the landscape that were, until then, invisible to our naked eye. While Green moves with her camera across the world, Neff brings the world into her studio. Her making process is one that relies heavily on research, experimentation, and assembly. She sources material from both the natural and domestic worlds, extracting elements for a visual vocabulary that she then alters and recontextualises. She often focuses on details the spectator might overlook: the rough texture of tree bark, the shadow of a travelling bird. Through this process of cropping and isolating, she reveals her unique relationship with the world.

In these seemingly paradoxical practices, both Green and Neff use natural light as a key tool. In a conversation with Green, the artist recalled how her antique camera enabled her to capture light in a way that other technologies could not—a lengthy process in which she sought the specific incidence of light that would impart the desired effect to the image. This is a key aspect in works such as Pollard Willow (2025), an image striking for its red saturation featuring a very old willow tree having undergone the ancient pruning technique. The painterly quality of this scene, achieved through light-induced transformation of colour, inescapably immerses the viewer in a poignant and emotion-stirring landscape where nature overwhelms the senses.

While Green was catching the light with her camera, Neff was patiently waiting for it. The Third Bird (2024) features the shadow of a bird on a pastel golden background. The bird—a vintage motion-activated toy on a miniature table—had been strategically placed to cast a shadow when summer solstice sunlight arrived. Neff had anticipated the sun's yearly trajectory, waiting for the precise moment that would complete her work. When the shadow finally fell onto her studio wall, it landed beside the mounted photograph of the persimmon tree from Self Shelf. The natural framing of the camera lens excluded the studio staging, leaving only the bird's shadow and the darkened edge of the persimmon tree visible in the final image. A last gesture that endowed the image with entirely new meaning and context.

Scottish Writer Nan Shepherd observed that "perhaps, the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see [a] mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle - as beauty." The act of "seeing" is, in fact, a collaborative act between the external world and our internal capacity to create meaning. The paradoxes presented in Green's and Neff's work—the impossible enigmas between what is real and what goes beyond reality—have the capacity to expose tacit assumptions about what we think nature is, or should be, as well as to expose our interconnectedness. Their work delves into the relationship between human activity and the natural world, questioning where culture begins and where nature ends. This is crucial, as we often act and react according to a one-dimensional view of reality, where what we see aligns with what we believe to be true.

Let us consider Pliny's Historia Naturalis: Zeuxis painted grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat them, though he was disappointed that the boy wasn't realistic enough to frighten them. Ausonius expanded on this: in Zeuxis's improved painting, three birds respond differently—one flees upon seeing the boy, one pecks at the false grapes, but the third simply observes calmly, symbolising true understanding that transcends both fear and deception. Neff, who referred to this story in The Third Bird, and Green's work delve right to the crux of this process of understanding. They do so powerfully and playfully, inviting the spectator to jump into the imaginary, to long for it as much as to question it.

Tally de Orellana, Independent Curator, December 2025