You and I Are Earth was the culmination of a year-long project on global, weather events, a series of paintings based on the portrayal of these events experienced through the TV, news and social media. The objective to record an entire year of reports, effectively freeze-framed fleeting images from various media, allowing time for more reflection of their serious nature, and to collectively observe a picture of climate change over 12 months. The intention was for the collection of paintings to be exhibited in its entirety in chronological order, with patterns of weather moving sequentially across the series, to reveal the magnitude of climate change across the globe.
Using the same colour palette unified the paintings, tying them together as one body of work.
Three years before making the project, I saw a film report on TV of the aftermath of cyclone Idai. The footage was of a man wading through a flood looking for clean water, and the composition echoed a painting I’d made previously, so I took photos of the tv screen and began to make work from the image. I didn’t realise how this painting would change my work at the time, but it interested me to paint from this immediate response. I then went on to collect screenshots of videos, news reports, storm chaser and amateur recordings of extreme natural events, all which were exacerbated by climate change.
Of course I am one person, absorbing information from news sources and social media. I collected hundreds of images and could only paint a small fraction of them, so in reality the project was illustrating a singular experience.
The initial title was revised to ‘You and I Are Earth’, inspired by an inscribed plate, dated 1661, found in a London sewer, now exhibited in the Welcome Collection. It explains in one perfectly formed phrase, our connectivity to nature, succinctly conveying the overall meaning and purpose of the project, fuelled by my own frustration at the lack of urgency and progress politically.
“We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.” Andy Goldsworthy