You and I Are Earth was a year-long project to paint global weather events exacerbated by climate change, which culminated in a series of paintings based on the experience of these events through the TV, mainstream news, and social media. The objective was to allow appropriate time for reflection of their serious nature, and to observe the picture of climate change over 12 months.
I had been painting the subject for some time, and had developed a technique for recording images from screen shots and short film exerpts, which I then utilised for the project.
The paintings were to be exhibited 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, 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, emotive response. I then went on to collect screenshots of videos, news reports, storm chaser and amateur recordings of extreme natural events.
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 choice was difficult, based on several elements; whether the image induced emotion, whether I could convey this using paint, if it would work within a small framework, whether the story was strong, where it was and whether I had painted this subject matter. As it went along I discovered that an overwhelming number of reports were of western countries, and stories of more remote and poorer countries were underreported. In light of this I set about searching for reports from these underreported countries by using the incredible resource, News Now. News Now is a live feed of news from every media and country, searchable by subject and country.
Each painting is 30 x 40cm, the approximate size and proportions of a laptop, the orientation of a tv.
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. I deeply care.
"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