What does it mean to make something slow in a world that rewards speed? To look properly at a leaf, a surface, shifting colour, when so much of modern life is designed to keep us scrolling?

‘Digital Detox’, the new solo show by Rosie Woods, turns away from the screen and back towards the physical world - not as an act of nostalgia or rejection, but as a way of reasserting the value of attention, tactility and presence. In an age of acceleration, the exhibition asks us to pause. To notice. To reconnect with the textures, rhythms and imperfections of the natural world, and with the profoundly human act of making by hand.

Rosie Woods has long worked at the intersection of art and technology, embracing digital tools through VR murals, animated paintings and major commercial commissions. But this new body of work marks a deliberate shift. Here, there is no digital intermediary, no slickness of screen, no algorithmic polish- only paint, linen, gesture and observation. ‘Digital Detox’ has become both a personal recalibration for the artist and a wider reflection on what is lost when our experience of the world is increasingly flattened through devices.

The exhibition unfolds through two connected bodies of work. The first is a series of botanical paintings: individual leaves that glow gold on raw, unprimed linen. Monstera, maple and alocasia -familiar forms often overlooked in daily life- are given scale and reverence with an intimate observation that is almost devotional. 

Alongside these are a series of looser, atmospheric abstract works that feel like landscapes filtered through memory rather than direct representation. Soft purples and moss greens are worked into blush and yellow tones in an instinctual way. If the botanical works ask the viewer to look closely, these paintings ask them to exhale-  to drift, feel and settle into the atmosphere.

Together, the works hold two modes of seeing at once: detail and sensation, precision and immersion. They reflect the experience of being in nature itself- noticing both the singularity of a leaf and the wider mood of a place. In that sense, ‘Digital Detox’ is less a retreat from technology than a return to perception.

As Woods explains: “Digital Detox is an exploration of the physical, the tactile, and the profoundly human. A reminder to breathe, to look, and to simply be, even if just for a minute.”

‘Digital Detox’ opens with a private view on Thursday 16 April 2026, 6–9pm, with refreshments generously provided by our friends at Jubel Beer. The exhibition runs until 3 May 2026.