PIGEONS, platters, collages and cockerels. Add to that foxes, gladioli, sheep and more pigeons and you will get a fair idea of what has been taking up painter and printmaker Mark Hearld’s time these last few months, in preparation for his latest much-anticipated solo show at the Scottish Gallery.

It’s been a busy few years for the artist who puts nature at the heart of his work. In 2015 he curated a show to open the refurbished York Art Gallery called The Lumber Room, a Hearld-ish fossick in the archives of York’s cultural institutions resulting in a room filled with treasures from the collections alongside works made by Hearld – a sort of three dimensional museum collage.

Hearld’s work has been in demand ever since his longtime friend, the artist Alex Malcomson, took a punt on the then recently graduated painter’s work and started to put his collages and prints in his Harrogate gallery shows. Since then Hearld, who is based in York, has exhibited throughout the UK, with exhibitions from Yorkshire Sculpture Park to Edinburgh, textiles and print work for St. Judes, and commercial ceramics projects with Emma Bridgewater and the Tate amongst many others.

Hearld’s subject is nature. Born in 1974, he studied at Glasgow School of Art before moving on to an MA in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art under a tutor who had himself been taught by the influential artist Edward Bawden.

“I’d been working largely in drawing and painting. It was only when I left college that I started looking at Picasso, then early John Piper and Julian Trevelyan and the wonderful Modernist British collages. I found the inherent graphic abstraction in a collage really exciting. I’d found my medium. From the first silhouette that I cut out, I really enjoyed the effect that it had on expressive mark making. I liked finding disparate things to make up my works, from found materials to appropriated materials. I liked finding a visual equivalent for something that I wanted to recreate in a box rather than having to make it. It’s the constraints of the thing that produces the creativity.”

The resulting works, imbued in nature, are vivid and graphical. You might call them still-life landscapes, although they are anything but still. The latest works, split in this Scottish Gallery exhibition into two distinct parts and peppering every available wall space in the downstairs gallery, are a vibrant example.

“Basically I began making work inspired by what was around me and the season. Opposite my house is a fantastic nature-filled allotment where I walk every day.” It has spawned images of a rumbustiously verdant space filled with pigeons and foxes, cockerels and hens. A large collage plots the view down a slip of land, alive with gladioli and dahlias, blackberries, the green hoops of vegetable cages, corrugated iron, a plastic chair, the tumbledown abundance of a living allotment.

In contrast to this effusion of contained nature, uncontained, there are the Shetland collages which are wilder and looser, the colour palettes sometimes more muted or reduced, but still vibrant. It was, says Hearld, the result of a “boys’ road trip” with Malcolmson (himself from Shetland) on a mission to rescue an abandoned fishing boat built by a significant Shetland boat builder and turn it to artistic use. Hearld went along for the ride, to Orkney first, pottering amongst the geos, then on to Shetland where they stayed in a baronial mansion on Vaila and watched sheep skittering over the rocks.

“I made tiny thumbnail drawings,” says Hearld. “I was looking really, really hard, completely switched on and full of ideas. It was wonderful. The texture of the sea and the edge of the sea,” he says. ”It’s a slightly more expansive work than I do when I’m in Yorkshire, when I focus more on inscapes. This was about space, big skies, views over water.”

Later, in the gallery in Edinburgh, he points out the different papers he has used in a selection of his collages. “There’s a Venetian paste paper from the 1940s…a scrap of patterned paper from a textile artist in the studio next to me…my own paste paper there…some bookbinding paper…”

His enthusiasm is palpable. He is full, he says, of renewed focus after having moved out of his home studio into a shared space at the ICE artists studios (Institute for Cultural Experimentation) in York earlier this year.

“I’ve got a lovely house, but I found the solitude of working at home a barrier whereas my partner (the illustrator Emily Sutton) thrives on that. I think it’s about an introvert and extrovert approach to life. Emily is topped up by solitude and I’m topped up by interaction. I’ve got so much more creative conviction, not needing to battle with the solitude.”

Alongside the collages and some prints, Hearld also exhibits new ceramics – large platters daubed with birds and animals or abstracts. There are some slipcast pigeons too, individually decorated and some horses from his Lumber Room show.

“Collage is the core of my work and my thinking,” says Hearld. “I think in a collaged way about creativity in general. But ceramics excite me too. They are more about my commitment to artists working as designers,” he says. “You should be able to turn your hand to anything creative, to making an object and working on something three dimensional. The two things in tandem reinvigorate each other.”

Mark Hearld: Collage, Pigeons and Platters, The Scottish Gallery, Dundas Street, Edinburgh to October 29.

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk