A TALENTED artist returns to the gallery with an exceptional and unique exhibition.

This exhibition will be Julian Meredith’s third solo show at the North House Gallery in just ten years.

He continues to be preoccupied with the loss of habitat and the extinction of creatures.

The exhibition started on Saturday, August 31 but runs until September 28.

His work is nothing you’ve heard of.

His prints of threatened whales- some even four metres long- tuna, other fish and birds are created in diverse ways.

They are either printed from sawn planks of elm, stencilled on heavily inked paper or printed from dead animals, a process which shockingly and incredibly re-animates them.

The preparation of the block, as well as the hand printing, is hard work.

Julian Meredith, who is a smallholder and a beekeeper, said: “I know that extinction is happening all around us, not because I have been told so, but because I grew up surrounded by an abundance of brown trout, bullheads, green plovers, eels, water voles and now I see almost none in what is a shrinking habitat.

“The kestrel that used to perch on our wires has gone and I have hardly heard a cuckoo this year.

“My work emerged out of this abundance I experienced around me.

“Now it is an act of rebellion against the loss that surrounds us all.

“My hope is that my images help people understand the balance of Nature that is under our feet; I want the images to be about the future, not the past.

“My fear is that, like my use of elm, my work will become a testimony to what once was: nature fossilised in wood, the paper waving like lost spirits.

“Let this not be so.”

The use of elm, a species lost to disease and hurricane, is sad enough in itself.

But when inked, its grain resembles flowing water and its contours look like waves.

Mr Meredith trained at Exeter College of Art.

He had numerous prestigious galleries since 1992 and was part in group shows since 1989, very often in the Royal Academy of Arts' Summer Show.

His collections include the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, Cartwright Hall in Bradford, and the Deutsche Bank and British Telecom.