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Summer Exhibition 2025: 'Listen To The Quiet'

Writer's picture: Rachel BebbRachel Bebb

These evocative words are the inspiration for this summer’s exhibition at RBC.


In a heartfelt call to action, which you can discover via the link below, conservationist Harrison Ford implores us to protect the beautiful tapestry of life to ensure our planet’s enduring stability.

Sadie Brockbank textiles
Sadie Brockbank, Winter Owl , framed textile, 32 x 40 cms, £300

According to the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, “Ford’s message was written in collaboration with Anthony Doerr, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer, and calls on people to celebrate the importance of biodiversity to our lives”. Edward Wilson was a renowned naturalist, biologist and entomologist, whose foundation “champions the conservation of global diversity”.


I urge you to watch this short film from the Foundation, and listen to the message. Think about those “quiet voices … the systems that sustain life on Earth”. Think about the wonderful tapestry of life, and the threads yanked out of it every day as “we unravel our own support systems”. Think about younger generations and the world we will leave them.



Tracey Sheppard engraved glass
Tracey Sheppard, Awesome, Peggles and Boojuns' - a celebration of some of the vanishing colloquial names for hawthorn berries, studio glass, lead crystal blown by Patrick Stern, ht. 18 cms, £535

What can we do to help, and to generate hope? In a blog I posted in October I wrote of art as communicator and educator. Last June’s sell-out event at RBC focused on seagrass, about which many people knew little or nothing, yet it provides vital habitat and sequesters carbon. Both the exhibition and the event helped to raise environmental awareness.



Visual artists, musicians, photographers - these and other creative practitioners can show us the beauty of the natural world. Their work and this film echo E.O. Wilson’s greatest hope – that we nurture an exciting adventure in nature, in order to best understand and care for it.


‘Listen to the Quiet’ opens on Saturday 17 May and runs until 14 June, after which it will continue by appointment. Opening times and further details will follow in due course - please note the dates now!


Kit Boyd Original Print
Kit Boyd, Beyond the Shallows, linocut, edition of 100, 23 x 43 cms, framed, £170

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