For years I was looking for a material that could carry the weight of the ideas I wanted to explore.

I found it in pollen.

The beginning of this journey came from a conversation about geology.

In recent years, scientists have debated whether humanity has changed the planet so dramatically that we have entered a new geological age: the Anthropocene. The question is not simply whether humans have had an impact on the Earth - that is undeniable - but whether that impact has left a permanent enough mark to be recognised millions of years from now in the geological record.

If a future geologist were to cut into the layers of the Earth and ask, when did humans arrive?, what evidence would they find? There were several possible answers.

The radioactive signature left behind by nuclear testing, the sudden increase in carbon deposits caused by industrialisation, plastics and other synthetic materials that have become embedded into the natural world. But Pollen really stuck out to me.

The pollen record is one of the ways we understand the history of landscapes. Over thousands of years, pollen grains have fallen from plants, travelled through the air, settled into lakes and soils, and created a microscopic archive of the vegetation that once existed.

"It is a record of life. And what that record shows is extraordinary."

For much of human history, landscapes were defined by complexity. Forests, grasslands, prairies and wildflower meadows contained huge varieties of plant species. The pollen deposited into the earth reflected this diversity. Over time the record becomes dominated by a handful of crops: wheat, maize, rice and soy. The complexity disappears. The landscape becomes a monoculture.

Future geologists may not understand the scale of industrial agriculture by looking at our cities or our machines, but by looking at this invisible evidence beneath the soil: the moment when thousands of different species were replaced by vast fields of a few genetically selected crops.

This was one simple symbol that was not just a beautiful natural material. It was a witness and a record for what we had done. I had spent years thinking about the relationship between humans and the natural world, and particularly the strange contradictions within our ideas of progress. We are capable of extraordinary acts of invention and creativity, but those same inventions often create consequences we never anticipated. Industrial agriculture is one of the clearest examples of this.

The development of modern farming has achieved incredible things. Machines, fertilisers and irrigation systems have allowed us to feed billions of people. Agricultural innovation has saved lives and transformed societies.

But the same systems have also reshaped ecosystems on an unimaginable scale.

Forests and grasslands have been cleared. Diverse landscapes have been replaced by single crops. The machines that allowed us to produce more food also changed the very definition of a landscape. This contradiction became central to my work.

The tractor is both an extraordinary piece of engineering and a tool that enabled industrial-scale farming. Chemical fertiliser is both an invention that prevented famine and part of a system that damaged future ecosystems.

Human innovation is rarely just one thing.

That complexity is what interested me.

The more I researched, the more I became fascinated by the individuals, machines and ideas that sit behind these enormous global systems. The landscape we see today is not accidental. 

The challenge is that success creates its own problems. Problems of success.

A machine designed to make farming more efficient allows fields to become larger. Larger fields require more clearing. More clearing reduces biodiversity. More efficiency can create new vulnerabilities. The same progress that solves one problem can quietly create another.

This became the starting point for Problems of Success - an ongoing body of work exploring the unintended consequences of human ambition.

Once I understood pollen as a record of these changes, I wanted to work with it directly.

"I began experimenting with making paint from pollen."

At first, it was a practical question: could this material become a pigment? But very quickly, the process became part of the meaning. Pollen comes from plants. It is a tiny fragment of the natural world, carrying genetic information and connecting one generation of plants to the next. Yet the pollen I was using was often the product of the very agricultural systems I was questioning - collected through industrial honey production, separated from its ecological role and sold as a commodity.

The material itself contained the contradiction.

A witness of biodiversity and a product of monoculture.

The earliest works were small, I used pollen ink and a nib pen to create delicate text pieces, often using phrases taken from reports, research papers and political documents. They became almost like messages from the future - warnings written in the material that would one day record our actions.

I began thinking of writing with pollen almost like a blood letter.

Throughout history, people have written messages in blood because it carries something deeply personal and irreversible. Pollen felt similar. It carried the story of the Earth itself.

A message written by the landscape.

The discovery that the smallest things - a tiny grain of pollen, almost invisible to the human eye - can tell the biggest stories.

The Earth remembers.

And sometimes, it remembers in pollen.