Winner of the NEAC Climate Emergency Prize 2025

Nessie Ramm is a contemporary landscape artist, whose work is inspired by plants, wildlife and the environment. She is a fellow member of the Society of Botanical Artists and during 2025-6 is working with Plantlife UK as their Creative Friend highlighting the value of road verges for wild plants and fungi. She lives in Wadhurst, East Sussex, where she also grows native flowers to re-wild road verges.

Hear from Nessie on how she uses art to raise awareness and insights into her artistic practice.

How would you describe your work in the exhibition?

My painting comes from a body of work exploring the biodiversity of UK road verges.

I have re-created a road sign from the A21 near Lamberhurst in Kent and painted its surface with the plants that I found growing in the verge around it. 

The plants are growing over and through the letters on the sign, like they do when you leave something on the ground for too long. They are beginning to reclaim them. ‘Reduce Speed Now’ is a familiar instruction on the roadside, but removed from that context the phrase has come to express my deep concern for the environment. Silhouettes of invertebrates are included, as well as some of the many threats they face.

How do you approach wider global issues like the climate emergency in your work?

Toadflax, woundwort, goat’s-beard, viper’s bugloss: the names read like a 16th Century Herbal. But if you’re looking for our native wildflowers you might struggle to find them in the countryside, where intensive methods can leave little habitat. Instead, turn your attention to the verges alongside Britain’s road network. There you will find these plants from a lost bucolic era, now taking refuge on roundabouts, slip roads and in litter-strewn lay-bys.

[I aim to] to render visible the wildness and value of these unloved spaces. [My work] is both a joyful celebration of what [I find] and also a call to re-evaluate our relationship with the natural world: can we make space for nature?

Road signs take on new meaning when they’re removed from the context of the roadside and I found that some of the phrases like Reduce Speed Now or Changed Priorities Ahead perfectly express my outrage at the senseless continuation of things we know to be harmful to nature and ourselves. I’m not a pessimistic person, we know what the solutions are and nature is ready and waiting - but we do need to act.

Please tell us about your journey exhibiting with the NEAC.

My work is not easy to categorise, it falls somewhere between botanical observation and contemporary art. As such it has been difficult for me to find an artistic home. So I was delighted to hear about the new Climate Emergency Prize, and I painted a large new piece specifically for my entry. I was delighted to be accepted, and this will be my first time exhibiting with the NEAC.

My physical journey to the receiving day at the Mall Galleries was rather memorable, I had to bring my road sign on a busy train which was diverted due to engineering works. The train terminated early and the final few miles were in a black cab - fortunately it fit in with a few inches to spare.

How do you see the relationship between drawing as a tool for seeing and drawing as a tool for feeling?

When I draw or paint on the roadside, I have learned to let go of the frustration of not being able to capture everything as I see it. My sketches are not a photographic representation of the scene, but rather a record of the experience of being there. I often finish a drawing at home and I find that I’m able to do so from memory once I’ve been drawing a scene for an hour or so. The finished piece often becomes more like the essence of the place than the actual place itself in the same way that a memory is never quite true.