As an environmentally engaged visual artist, my recent assimilations of drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture have invited the viewer to move into a space of speculation about climate change and its consequences. My most recent sculpture ‘Overgrown’, speaks of a surreal global warming scenario where a dandelion becomes gigantic because of out of control carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I have tried to encourage and ignite a collective environmental identity and empathy for our immediate, rapidly changing natural environment, via our human imagination. This large sculpture of a large dandelion also explores our hyper-visual engagement with nature, were very small weeds are overlooked or the unseen. Like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ our perception becomes momentarily distorted, were we become smaller and plants become much larger than normal. 

 

Art is an active empathy. Never has there been a more crucial time in human history for art to be used to re-engage emotionally with the natural environment, preserving it for future generations. I wish my sculpture to have the possibilities of changing ones thought, opening new ideas and changing perceptions of the natural world. The subject matter of climate change is so vast. Through the variety of my materials and process used in this project I am trying to simplify the subject to assist with continuous awakening and reconnecting with the visual world and our natural environment.