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In 1995, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei picked up a valuable 2,000-year-old piece of pottery, held it up for a camera, and dropped it, smashing it against the pavement. In fact he dropped two, but apparently the first time the camera did not capture the moment effectively. This event became his famous three-photo series Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, one of my personal favourite works of art.

You can read endless articles online discussing the rebellious message of this work, what it says about the Chinese state or traditionalism or the future. But what has captivated me since I saw these photos is the question of why they have such an effect on the viewer at all. If the urn was smashed 2000 years ago, as many probably were, it might have been a shame, but not controversial. It wouldn't have resonated on a political or artistic level in anything like the same way. What has changed in the past 2000 years?

Ai Weiwei, in this piece, simply answers 'nothing'. The reverence that cultures seem to hold for ancient things is an illusion. Age only adds value to objects because we believe it does, but perhaps we shouldn't. Perhaps we should allow things to decay, to fall apart and be replaced. Perhaps it is good that some things disappear.

In the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog shows us a rare view of the Chauvet Cave in France, home to a huge variety of images drawn, scratched and painted on the rocks. In one moment he points to a pair of overlapping deer drawn in charcoal and tells us that according to carbon dating, they could have been drawn 5,000 years apart. He remarks 'We are locked in history, and they were not.'

Herzog's comment is characteristically oblique, but it fascinated me in the same way as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. If smashing a 2,000 year old piece of craftsmanship is shocking to us, drawing over a 5,000 year-old piece of cave art is almost unthinkable. But if our prehistoric vandal was aware that the image they were drawing over was as almost incomprehensibly ancient, older then than most parts of Stonehenge are now, it didn't stop them. For whatever reason they believed that their work was just as valuable as their ancient precursor and now, with tens of thousands of years of hindsight, it feels almost foolish to disagree.

It's apparently only because a landslide sealed the cave 28,000 years ago that the interior of Chauvet is as well-preserved as it is. Other ancient art exists, of course, but there is very little that is as old or as complete. What is certain is that the vast, vast majority of art from that time is completely gone, and we will never even know where it was. This may seem tragic, but the same is true of most art from the entirety of human history. One fact I think about often is that every time someone sang or spoke prior to the invention of sound recording equipment in the late 19th century it was heard once, and never again.

Throughout our history, humans have attempted to find ways of preserving or reproducing art. In fact, ironically, the majority of those attempts have likely also been lost to time. It seems natural to try and resist the flow of time, to wade upstream or hold our precious things above the current. But examples like Chauvet cave show us that this is not an unavoidable impulse. Perhaps we would be happier embracing the transience of these experiences, accepting that nothing needs to be seen by everyone. Perhaps it is better that some things disappear.

Werner Herzog had to get special permission from the French Minister of Culture to film within Chauvet. For preservation reasons the cave is normally closed to the public. Seeing the heavy steel door which has been set into the entrance I found myself wondering what would happen if someone ever lost the keys. But this is far from the only case in which it is deemed better to hide things from the public. I myself have been involved in a project like this. While working in a very small role on a pine marten reintroduction program, I was instructed to keep all details of tracking data and the locations of release pens secret. We camouflaged these pens with branches, partly to help the pine martens settle and partly to hide them from human eyes.

The most fascinating hidden species to me are the secret trees which exist around the world. The Wollemi Pine is a species from South Eastern Australia which was thought to be extinct until a single grove was discovered in 1994. Genetic analysis has shown that in the past the population may have been as small as two individual trees. Although cuttings have now been grown throughout the world as part of regeneration efforts, the precise location of this original grove is a carefully guarded secret.

In large populations of redwood trees, occasionally an 'albino' can be found. Many species of plants can produce similar white-leaved mutants, but only the redwood is capable of sharing enough nutrients through its roots to make up for the lack of chlorophyll and keep the albino alive. It's speculated that, in return, the albino may help in removing heavy metals from the soil. There are roughly 400 known to exist along the west coast of Turtle Island, but much like the Wollemi Pine, their locations are a secret, known only to researchers and the indigenous peoples who consider them to be sacred.

Sometimes, nature keeps her own secrets. Returning to Australia, the carnivorous thylacine was seemingly driven to extinction by competition with the invasive dingo, with the last known specimen dying in captivity in 1936. There have been many reports of sightings in the wild ever since, but none confirmed. Hearing about this I can't help but wish that if such a population exists, they will never be found. Perhaps it is best that some things disappear.

When out in nature (and in my daily life), I find myself gravitating towards natural colours in my clothing and appearance choices. Part of this certainly comes from an appreciation for these colours in and of themselves. I enjoy wearing greens which remind me of leaves and moss or browns which remind me of soil and bark. Part of this tendency also comes from a desire to signal my feelings of being part of nature, to become indistinguishable from the forests or the meadows where I walk.

I have been captivated by camouflage for as long as I can remember. While I limit my wearing of it because of its military asssociations, I find the patterns beautiful and fascinating. Creating these non-representational shapes which are nonetheless optimised to blend into the scenery, like an average of the entire biome, is magical in a way. Camofleurs blend art and science, evolutionary psychology, photography, colour theory, optics, painting, zoology and geometry to make humans, equipment and anything else become indistinguishable from the world around them. When I wear my earth-toned clothing, the principles of camouflage are never far from my mind.

I think the most transcendent experiences I have had in nature are those in which I have felt so small as to almost vanish into the world. It takes a certain mindset and a certain moment to forget that you yourself exist separately from the world around you. I've felt this in small meadows which buzzed so heavily with insects that I lost track of myself while taking it all in, and on mountains so huge I forgot that things as small as me could be real. I suspect that my attempts to camouflage myself are at least partly intended to make this point easier to reach. Sometimes it's good to let yourself disappear.