Poisonous plants are everywhere for those with eyes to see, London artist Georg Wilson would tell you. Wilson began to notice the hidden-in-plain-sight world of noxious flora earlier this year, when embarking on a new body of work.

“I collected lots of second-hand books with lists of species or scientific drawings of plants,” Wilson explained of her research. “Suddenly, on walks around London, I noticed that these poisonous plants were growing everywhere. Near my studio, I saw thorn apple, which is one of the most poisonous plants that grows wild in the U.K. Its sap is really poisonous. The plant was taller than me with these amazing, architectural, spiky seed pods. It looked so monstrous and intriguing, but I’d never noticed it until having done this reading.”

Wilson, who works in a studio in a converted Victorian church in North London, is one of the defining artists of the para-pastoral, a new movement in art that recasts the countryside, not as an idyllic refuge, but as a disruptive place of confrontation with longstanding myths about nature and nostalgia.

Georg Wilson, The Dream (Henbane) (2025). Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias.

The Dark Side of Nature 

Last year, Wilson made her solo debut with Pilar Corrias, London, with “The Last Oozings” presenting a series of folkloric scenes inspired by autumn and the oak tree’s role as guardian of the forest. Her paintings are often populated by mythical beings, neither human nor animal, woman nor man, whose forms seem to grow out of the landscape itself. These paintings, which explore the myths and histories of the English countryside, specifically, upend the tidiness of landscape painting, which Wilson sees as tied to the history of land ownership and the fetishizing of unpopulated terrain.

This week, Wilson opens “Against Nature,” her second solo show with Pilar Corrias, and the first since the gallery announced representation. Here she delves into the world of these poisonous plants, complicating our understanding of the controlled English countryside. These plants become nature’s rebellious agents, disruptive protagonists. Meanwhile, “Against Nature” coincides with “The Earth Exhales,” Wilson’s institutional debut at Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh, where Wilson presents verdant but strange scenes that invoke the magic and innate potency of the land.

Georg Wilson, Darkness Came Over (2025). Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Eva Herzog.

While Wilson’s enchanted beings still wander around her newest paintings, here the main protagonists are the poisonous plants themselves—henbane, thorn apple, and nightshade.

“This is a new theme within the wider themes of my practice, which interrogates the history of British landscape painting,” said Wilson, “Poisonous plants became an interesting way to explore a non-human perspective.” In Vespertine (Thorn Apple) (2025), a thorn apple bush appears majestic and towering against a crepuscular sky. Wilson paints the plants’ roots and networks, offering a cut view into the life below ground, and suggesting networks of knowledge humans aren’t privy to.

“Lots of these poisonous plants grow in abundance with no human help. They are often found growing at their best in wasteland or by motorways or bits of scrappy building sites and stuff,” said Wilson, “They thrive in this land abandoned by humans, in unnoticed, underappreciated, or uncultivated areas.”

Wilson finds these plants both monstrous and magical. “They have gleaming blackberries or spiky leaves or seed pods or a tangling structure to them,” she said. “It was interesting looking at distinct shapes as well as reading about their risks in England specifically. These poisonous plants represent a very rare element of the English countryside that poses a real threat or harm.”

Georg Wilson, Vespertine (Thorn Apple) (2025). Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Eva Herzog.

More than anything, poisonous plants emerge here as living relics of an era of lost knowledge. Researching historic texts, Wilson discovered that many of these poisonous plants served medicinal purposes in their own times. The erosion of plant knowledge coincided with the enclosure of common land in the U.K., which consolidated previously shared, communal, or open fields into privately managed farmland, consolidating the powers of landowners. This enclosure began as early as the 15th century and continued through the laws enacted into the 18th and 19th centuries.

“I realized these plants require you to listen to them and pay attention to them,” Wilson explained. “Depending on the quantity you ingest, these plants can very quickly switch from a cure or a medicine into something harmful.” Some of these plants are still used in modern medicine, but with origins sometimes predating the Middle Ages. The keepers of this plant knowledge were often women working in folk medicine for the wider community, which became heavily associated with witchcraft. “Witches were often just women who had plant knowledge,” Wilson added. Two of the largest paintings in the show, Vespertine (Thorn Apple) (2025) and The Dream (Henbane) (2025), depict poisonous plants which were used in a potion called Witch’s Flying Ointment.

Georg Wilson, Host (Cuckoo Pint) (2025). Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Eva Herzog.

“When ingested in different ways, these plants could cause the sensation of being dazed or induce the sensation of flying,” she said, “This is where the whole idea of witches flying on broomsticks came from. These poisonous plants are central to many spooky myths about people who had early plant knowledge.”

Formally and technically, these works enter new territory. Wilson paints seasonally—past works have taken the tones of autumn or spring landscapes—here she steps into a more muted world between day and night, where colors are muted and ambiguous, and the eye must search for orientation and meaning, offering a sense of disorientation that mirrors our dwindling knowledge of the natural world.

“I chose to dwell in a much darker palette. The work is sitting in a twilight, low-contrast zone, where a plant or silhouette of a figure might only slowly come to you as you look at the painting for longer, as though your eyes are adjusting in the dark. The veil between worlds might be quite thin,” she said. “This gloom fit quite well conceptually with the idea of abandoned space in which the plants thrive.” In this show, she also debuts an oil painting on copper for the first time with Spectre (Fetid Hellebore) (2025), a medium that hints, in and of itself, at lost traditions.

Georg Wilson, Spectre (Fetid Hellebore) (2025). Oil on copper. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Eva Herzog.

While these scenes are of a fantastical, unreal world, there are hints of the medieval. In many of these paintings, uncanny celestial orbs hover overhead. Wilson took inspiration from illuminated manuscripts. “Medieval manuscripts come from a time we can’t ever fully realize,” she said, “I don’t think we can ever fully understand what it would have been like to live in that preindustrial society and that relationship to nature. The celestial bodies of suns, moons, and comets from that medieval culture of image making fascinate me.”

But while Wilson doesn’t seek to reclaim the past, she offers windows into the possibilities of a rewilded world.  “I want a sense of enchanted magic and wonder to come out of the work,” she said, “It doesn’t really matter whether a painting is twilight or day. It’s just that sort of period of change, of transformation that matters.