Silian Gallery is delighted to welcome back Kimi Zoet with What Is Wild?, a new exhibition exploring re-wilding, ecological wisdom and our relationship with the natural world. Informed by visits to re-wilding landscapes and conversations with ecologists, these paintings begin with a deceptively simple question: what does a healthy tree look like?
For Zoet, the answer began to change through close observation. A fallen branch, a hollow trunk, a tree bending towards the ground - things that might once have appeared damaged or neglected revealed themselves as places of shelter, nourishment and renewal. At Knepp and the Ealing Beaver Project, she encountered landscapes in which apparent disorder supports life. What we instinctively tidy away may be precisely what allows something else to flourish.
This discovery moves through the paintings themselves. Working outdoors, Zoet responds intuitively to the landscape through large, expressive gestures. In the studio, paint is allowed to drip, soak and settle, its unpredictable behaviour becoming part of the work. Shown alongside smaller, more intimate paintings, these surfaces hold an evolving understanding of wildness, where growth and decay belong to the same living process.
The questions reach beyond the countryside. Wildness persists in weeds pushing through pavement cracks, untended gardens and ivy finding its way across buildings. These quiet interruptions invite us to reconsider the boundaries we draw between the cultivated and the unruly, and the impulse to shape our surroundings; and ourselves; into something more orderly.
What Is Wild? marks the beginning of an ongoing investigation. Through painting, conversation and shared attention, Zoet invites us to look again at what we overlook. Perhaps there is something to learn from a landscape allowed to follow its own rhythms: a different understanding of care, and of our place within a world we share.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kimi Zoet (b. 1997) is a Dutch artist and PhD researcher at UAL whose practice is rooted in direct encounters with people and places. Working predominantly outdoors, she allows observation, conversation, chance and the behaviour of materials to shape her paintings and drawings.
Her current project, What Is Wild?, brings painting into conversation with ecology, exploring overlooked and unruly forms of nature. From her small urban studio garden to rewilding landscapes beyond the city, her work considers how shared knowledge and sustained attention can change the way we see our surroundings.
Zoet received her BA from the University of Bristol and her MA from Falmouth University. Her work has previously been exhibited at Silian Gallery, and her practice has developed through residencies including PADA, Lisbon, and her current residency at Gallery 475, Fulham.
Exhibition on view from 13 November to 10 December 2026
Wednesday–Sunday, 9:30am–5:30pm
Silian Gallery, 434 King’s Road, London SW10 0LJ