THE SENTIENCE OF NATURE
LAMB GALLERY
in good company
MAYFAIR london UK 2025
LAMB Gallery X Studio Wright
In Good Company February 13th - 1 July 2025
LAMB Gallery 32 St George St W1S 2EA
The sentience of nature
The sentience of nature invites us into a space of expanded perception, one where plants are not passive backdrop but active participants in a sentient ecology. Here, the forest is not an assembly of individuals, but a living collective: a consciousness distributed across roots, fungi, and leaves; a superorganism pulsing with memory and exchange.
Beneath the soil, a hidden architecture unfolds. Fungi extend their fine threads of hyphae into the dark, forming intimate, cellular bonds with plant roots. Through this vast underground lattice, trees and plants become part of a communal network known as the "Wood Wide Web" a name that only hints at its mystery. Within this system, nutrients are shared, warnings sent, kin recognised. The forest listens to itself.
This ancient alliance formed over hundreds of millions of years reveals a form of knowledge that is not linear but fungal, not spoken but felt. It is a system of reciprocity, attention, and care. The fungi offer the minerals and trace elements of the deep earth; the trees gift the sugars spun from sunlight. But more than this, they communicate. They remember. They look after one another.
To recognise this is to unlearn centuries of "plant blindness" a cultural refusal to acknowledge vegetal intelligence, rooted as far back as Aristotle’s division between “active” animals and “inert” plants. Against this lineage, the sentience of nature proposes a return to wonder: a slow recalibration of what we understand by consciousness, kinship, and the sacred.
Walt Whitman once wrote: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” In this light, every forest becomes a kind of cosmos mysterious, interconnected, divine.