With the oil painting Fruits of the Forest, Scottish-Dutch artist and writer Janice McNab (b. 1964) transforms a plastic chocolate tray into a stylised, artificial landscape. The forms resemble mountains and valleys, but their smooth, symmetrical shapes and glossy surfaces reveal their origins in industrial packaging. Painted in subdued tones of mauve, grey, and reddish brown, the scene appears more manufactured than natural. The painting is part of The Chocolate Box Paintings, a series that explores artificial landscapes of consumption. McNab draws on the legacy of nineteenth-century confectionery brands, such as Cadbury, which utilised sentimental rural imagery to market mass-produced chocolate. Rather than reproducing these romanticised scenes, she focuses on the disposable packaging inside the chocolate boxes. By presenting this throwaway material as a landscape, McNab gestures toward the growing presence of plastic in the natural environment while inviting reflection on how environmental damage is embedded not only in the materials we consume but also in the visual languages that normalise and promote such consumption.

Janice McNab, born 1964

Born in Aberfeldy, Perth & Kinross, McNab studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, completing her Finer Art degree at the latter in 1997. In 2000, McNab moved to Amsterdam on a Scottish Arts Council residency programme, leading to a permanent move to the Netherlands. Over the last two decades, McNab has painted numerous subjects in series that deal with documenting matters such as contemporary life, consumption and the body. She is currently Head of the Artist Research MA at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.