20 Years after meeting as students at Glasgow School of Art, Rachel Vollerthun, Jim Ramsay, Daniel Bell and Jakob Anckarsvärd reunite for a show at Studio 44. All four artists have a practice that involves painting, but each has a different approach to the medium, exploring a variety of styles and ideas. They now come together under the banner Wild Life, presenting their experiments in colour and aesthetics, and their continued engagement with new materials. Evolving over the past decades, the artists’ work converges here in an ethereal contemplation on nature and decay.

Ramsay cuts into his paintings. The parts are then recycled and reformed into new works that could not have been guessed beforehand. The glitch and the uncanny are important parts of the work. Ramsay likens his process to the way plant hybrids are made using grafting techniques. The aim is to make unpredictable new species.

Anckarsvärd revisits a creek from his summer home, finding it flooded as a result of climate change. His wild and violent colours capture trees once on the banks, now mid-stream. Glasgow School of Art introduced a political awareness into his process, enhancing his investigations into aesthetic values.

Vollerthun’s work focuses on our relationship with nature: the push/pull of attraction/revulsion when we are confronted with it in its complexity, and the inescapable bond underlying this. With sustainable materials at the heart of her practice, she uses homemade pigments, clays, charcoal and chalk, incorporating recycled objects and those found in nature.

Bell takes inspiration from plants, animals and fungi, creating small scenes of mutation and destruction. Hovering between realism, caricature and abstraction, his work takes shape using a variety of paints, varnishes and gels. It’s an intuitive approach, and one that uses nature and wildlife as fertile territory for spawning unusual forms and surfaces.