Land Obsolescence
Land Obsolescence is a series of paintings memorializing disappearing landscapes. The imagery is derived from abandoned sites, mostly coastal, and the communities who left them, forced into migration by the effects of the climate crisis. Riffing-off the Romantic traditions of historic landscape painting with its idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past, Land Obsolescence creates complex spaces of longing and loss. The work weaves concrete and objectively perceived elements of place with the hard-wired emotional attachments people have for their historic homelands. This is a complicated mélange of fraught nostalgia, destruction and resilience, revealed through blooming stains and tenuous structures, blurring boundaries between internal and external, figuration and abstraction, representational space and the physical gestures of painting itself.
