There are many reasons to spend time alone amongst the trees: for solitude, health and wellbeing; for unbound wildlife, ambrosial scents and vivid colours; to observe and embrace the cyclical passing of seasons, from bittersweet melancholy to radiant flushes of life and optimism. Raised in the woody lands of middle England by zoologist and artist parents, British artist Thom Trojanowski has consistently looked to the forest as a site for exploration, wisdom and metaphor – whether the thick groves of Tunstall Forest near Suffolk, England, where the artist grew up, or Hoge Kempen’s expansive heathlands outside of Genk, the city in which he has lived and worked for the past five years. Captured by the duality and magic between its tangle of thorny shadows, the forest for Trojanowski is both a universal cornerstone for stories of survival, decay and renewal that we all share, as well as a dense and mystical preserve for our inner lives.

Stemflow, you and I is Trojanowski’s first exhibition in Genk and features painting, ceramics, pastel drawings and ecological ephemera produced in response to the city’s unique natural geography and post-industrial landscape. Inspired by daily walks up Winterslag Terril, Trojanowski couples his acidic, enigmatic landscapes – populated with rhapsodic portraits, butterflies, spikes, gnarled tree trunks and a near porcelain treatment of colour and form – with overtures to the bitter tonality of Genk’s mining past: charcoal greys, splinters of ivory sunlight and marbled shadows of teal, cream and stone. Evoking the indelible scars of extraction and heavy industry on the soul of the landscape, Stemflow, you and I foregrounds a sombre and introspective mood that nevertheless presents us with the daydreaming, the bright and unabating desire we have to reconnect with the outside – to the richness and complexity of the ecological world around us.

Forcing us to confront the siren of ecological collapse alongside the weird and magical reality of a more-than-human world, the weight of atmosphere in Trojanowski’s work is felt not only through physicality, scale and material intuition – his glazed, graphic style resonating with modernist tiles, door handles and mosaics inspired by natural forms that adorn properties across Genk – but through the visual compression of psychological and physical landscapes. This eidetic language finds its vanishing point in washed-out stains of canvas that wane and contrast their material heaviness, collapsing distinctions of interior and exterior, human and non-human, into a pre-romantic mysticism evocative of the works of William Blake or the intoxicating surrealist landscapes of Max Ernst – worlds where linear time and human agency are engulfed by a foreign terrain of rhythms, pulsions and patterinings beyond our knowing.

With angular twists of bare and knotted branches, it is nevertheless trees that continue to define Trojanowski’s uncanny, allegorical world. Loosely brushed, with confident, free-flowing use of pigment, linseed oil and turpentine, trees dance between chemically-infused, hypnotic totems to a series of fallen heroes, stripped bare, bleached and mottled. They stand as witness to the inevitable – at times brutal – passage of time that we all face, buckled and withered, reaching out for connection. For Trojanowski, the forest is a place of contradictory and complex majesty – where one can get away from the speed and pressures of everyday urban life to reclaim a deep sense of enchantment with the natural world – if, at times, this may only be achieved through the estranged and painterly invocation of memory, place and feeling. Stemflow, you and I opens on 21st June 2025, this year’s summer solstice.