SKULL PAINTINGS

Human technology has caused the beginning of the sixth mass extinction, which as the globe heats will affect all life on the planet. According to climate scientist Peter Kalmus, “The most comprehensive extinction forecast of 15% - 37%, or even as much as 50% of all Earth's species committed to extinction by 2050, is likely an underestimate.” The biodiversity crisis, like climate change, is a symptom of ecological overshoot of Homo sapiens. Other creatures do not get a voice as the destructive super organism of human enterprise quite literally devours its fellow species along with habitable land, natural resources. Almost 70% of all animal life has disappeared since 1970; only 4% of mammals are wild—the rest being humans and their livestock.

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I feel and contemplate the weight of our current ecological destruction, and the resulting double-bind that the lifestyle of endless growth creates on a planetary scale. My painting process has been an invaluable element that allows me to converse with ideas that are spiritual, ecological, and existential in a way that sheer intellect cannot. My paintings and I have been following a thread that has explored beyond the implications of climate change and mass extinction and into the many inherent contradictions that modernity brings.  My personal wrestling with spiritual questions as they relate to the polycrisis is aided by the painting process.