You are standing atop a green hill. You are in the middle of a meadow on a sunny day. This vibrant, colourful place is your spiritual landscape – alive and warm. You are not haunted by any troubling thoughts or distractions here. No sadness of the day can reach you.  You can relax, let go and leave everything behind. You feel more complete and fulfilled in this wild landscape. Your thoughts grow sparse, leaving only what is good and positive. This is your place. This is the destination you have been striving for.

Have you noticed that your spiritual landscape is the default wallpaper for Windows XP? Have the hours spent in front of the screen made you feel safe in a mediated version of nature? When did you become part of it? Breathe in, breathe out.

Nature-deficit disorder is not yet a recognised medical term, but it should be. Nature, the last bastion of balance, seems increasingly out of reach. Meanwhile, science leaves no room for doubt – nothing relieves stress, soothes and restores inner harmony as effectively as communing with nature. And so we seek contact with nature through surrogates: we surround ourselves with plants in our homes and offices, listen to digital recordings of rain, sea and birdsong, and immerse ourselves in landscapes that exist only on screen.

The exhibition title refers to one of the most iconic photographs – the image by Charles O’Rear that became the default wallpaper for Windows XP. This image of an ideal landscape – sky, hills and lush greenery – is the most popular representation of ‘nature’ in its surreally perfect, digital version. It is an image of illusion, a landscape so saturated with colour and unreal as to be almost saccharine, yet a symbol of our longings and need for freedom.