The wood-cuts I am making at the moment seem to be driven by a deep sadness for how completely out of sync we are with the natural and semi-natural world. But rather than make images of desertification leached eco-systems, clear-cutting bush fires, unoxygenated water courses and so-on, my current instinct is to try and celebrate the beauty in what we do have. Yeats put it so succinctly when he wrote 'I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way'. Here a part of a family, like members of a nomadic tribe, are about to enter the deep forest which has been coppiced in the foreground. Their parting reminds me of the inevitability of how, as a parent, it is painful to witness our children walk out into the world – TH