Cole & Son | Tree of Life

Tree of Life is a collaboration in the literal sense: artists from Cole & Son and from Ardmore hand-painted the ornamented fauna within a single expansive tableau, and the two hands remain distinguishable in it. The subject is the baobab, and around it the design gathers the fruits, flowers, birds and animals of a South African year, so the panel reads as a season rather than a snapshot.

It is painted at full scale, which is why it works. The foliage is dense at the base and opens out overhead; the creatures are placed in the canopy at the height they would actually occupy; and the ornamentation on them is Ardmore's, patterned and ceramic in feel, closer to modelled decoration than to natural history. Nothing is stylised down into a motif, and nothing repeats in the way a conventional wallpaper repeats.

Hung as a straight match, it can run as a repeating scene across a long wall or be used as a single tableau on one. Both work, but the second is usually the stronger decision: a panel of this kind wants a wall it can own, with the furniture kept low and the lighting warm. In a dining room, a stair hall or a double-height space it does what a mural does, which is to fix the character of a whole room from one surface.