Nicola Moss: Trees are the Answer

“We shape nature, and nature shapes us.” With this simple symmetry, Nicola Moss sets the tone for Trees are the Answer, a new body of work that considers the reciprocity between human and environment. As the decade moves toward the critical benchmarks of 2030 — the year by which global emissions must fall by nearly half to limit warming to 1.5°C — questions of sustainability and adaptation have become urgent measures of daily life. Moss turns her gaze to the local, to the cultivated green spaces that punctuate city life and quietly absorb our collective anxiety. In these places of shade and stillness, she finds evidence of resilience and possibility, gestures toward a shared capacity for renewal.

At the heart of the exhibition sits the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, a cultivated oasis hemmed in by glass towers. Built as a gesture of diplomacy and cultural kinship, it becomes for Moss both subject and metaphor, a microcosm of how we might live with the world rather than simply in it. For Moss, painting begins with presence, with time spent within the stillness and life of gardens and their quiet negotiation between design and disorder. Across these new works, she attends to the garden as both a record and a release—a place that carries time and also slips free from it. It offers a reminder, as writer Olivia Laing observes in The Garden Against Time, of our need to move in step with slower, ecological rhythms. In Moss’s paintings, these temporalities unfold in the layering of gesture and colour; her surfaces shift between cultivation and wildness, holding space for the quiet persistence of growth.

From this centre, Moss moves into other remembered ecologies, her Plant Dreams series lending a curious interiority to flora and asking us to view plants as personified subjects rather than scenery. Trees here behave like companions and witnesses: they shelter memory, register weather and care, and absorb the history of the places they occupy. A bonsai may yearn for the loose generosity of a forest; a transplanted tree can read as a survivor, stoic and attentive after the violence of storm and erosion. By animating trunks, branches and canopy with the language of gesture and colour, Moss invites an empathetic exchange, a modest humanising of plant life that makes their presence feel proximate, emotional and necessary.

Through her enduring city and nature project, Moss maps a contemporary poetics of urban ecology. Her paintings become repositories of experience and imagination, collaged and painted from memory and observation. They hold space for trees as agents of cooling, restoration and joy — reminders of the fragile systems we depend upon. As deadlines for global change threaten to drift further into the distance, Moss’s works insist on the present tense of care. They ask what it means to act now, to notice, to repair, and to live in concert with the living world before the promises of 2030 become yet another postponed horizon.

Bradley Vincent

Curator and Arts Writer