Icarus Falls
The Earth is an interconnected system and changes in one area can influence changes in all others leading to intense droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, catastrophic storms and extinction level biodiversity. The human experience and condition is impacted by all of these and human existence will be less comfortable. Science and man's rapacious progress has created a Pandora's box which neither controls or fully understands the future. They stand disassociated from the Earth, a living organism which humans' solely rely on for survival, security and social cohesion.
Much will be lost and the fundamental human experience will regress to a primordial or medieval state where neither wealth nor privilege will matter. Human belief that it it can overcome nature with a few tweeks is a hubris guided by words from those promoting trust and believe in science, while harbouring political agendas and internalised thoughts of safe havens. Those imbued with wealth, power and control believe they are able to limit the situation for their time on earth and their place in it. Common sense attitudes have no place in their inner world and they turn a blind eye to the realities existing in the other exterior world. Like Icarus they have forgotten the power of the sun.
Broken Contract
Humans are unreliable but we all talk about rights, obligations, responsibilities and what these will be measured against. The contract with nature is for human benefit, it is not one that is written but a silent promise to look after home for the benefit of family. A commitment to a relationship of mutual respect.
Consistently humans' neglect their environment for the want of things. We all do it. We therefore have only ourself to blame for the environmental violence and calamity that will descend on earth. The force of power they bring will be unknown and likely unsurvivable.
Painting The "Iris"
Using watercolour Gino records the life over many years of two Irises he planted in his garden, with the intention of investigating how they exist and the impact that climate change has on them.
Museum of Climate Change -The Catalogue
Humans' impact on the environment has led to deforestation, habitat destruction, air and water pollution, resource depletion, and the release of greenhouse gases, which have led to climate change. Humans’ impact on the environment also contributes to the loss of biodiversity with many species made extinct.
The catalogue archives objects in the collection of The Museum of Climate Change. Each object in the growing collection refers to the impact and fracturing of nature caused by human activity.
The Extinguishing Light of Prometheus
The light given to humans' by Prometheus is slowly extinguishing as humanity inexorably pushes its habitat to its limit causing the self destruction of humanity. Unlike Prometheus humans' live in a world subject to death.
What is next? What will we become? Who will survive? are a few questions that we ask without answer because humans are powerless against the forces of nature. The hubris is we believe we have. The speculation is we can survive by journeying to habitable planets in the solar system. Yet here we are on a planet which sustains life, that we destroy!
Changing Landscape
Industry destroys
Landscapes have naturally adapted over time. The weather and shifts in the tectonic plates of the earth and other large scale processes of change attest to a world constantly changing. The addition of human activity and the destructive processes caused by human need has added major stresses to the health of a living Earth, Gradually humans have suffocated and destroyed the environment. it seems need is a greater influence than security of home.
