PAINTING THE DARK ECOLOGY engages with ecological crisis not only as an environmental issue but as a cultural one, confronting life and death, the aftermath of Colonialism, extinction and post-humanism. It manifests as Vanitas symbolism, distressed palimpsest surfaces, hybrid and post-human forms and an overarching sense of melancholia and the uncanny.
‘‘/ˈvanɪtɑːs/: … a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death.’’
In the Vanitas Series, I draw inspiration from the 17th century still life genre with its associated Vanitas symbolism and adapt it for life in the Anthropocene. I reference many of these traditional symbols to comment on contemporary anxieties concerning the destruction of nature. The series also foregrounds uncanny hybrids and speculative, post-human forms. They convey salutary ideas about a post-human world in which new species evolve or mutate, take back what has been extracted and join forces with artificial intelligence to defy environmental degradation and habitat loss.
The construction of palimpsests, artworks that are reused or altered but still bear traces of earlier iterations, echoes the erosion of ecosystems while visually suggesting time’s passage. In the Algal Bloom Diptych, successive layers of paint suggest the onslaught of the algal bloom in the pristine coastal waters of South Australia followed by the suffocating decay of marine life and coral/sponge gardens.
Underlying my interest in dark ecology is a desire to re-enchant people with the world around them, moving them from detachment toward recognition, empathy and responsibility. I believe art can reveal ecological processes and hidden interconnections that are not obvious in everyday life, making us more aware of our entanglement with our environment.
