Weight of the World

Weight of the World

“Weight of the World” is a series of collages and installations that call attention to major environmental issues affecting our world. The work addresses the existential threat of climate change, environmental degradation, species extinction, and our callus and destructive behavior causing these radical changes amid war and partisanship.

As humans, we have had an staggering impact upon our environment, from the mass destruction of natural habitat to introduction and spread of invasive species while simultaneously driving countless other species into extinction. We have taken so much water from the ground that we have even changed how the Earth sits upon its axis! We have colonized every corner of this planet without giving much thought to what is required to sustain the Earth and other species cohabitating with us. Many of us seem to have forgotten that our fate is tied to that of the Earth and its other inhabitants.

We face a future in which compromised and dwindling resources will make cooperation  increasingly difficult. Rising temperatures and extreme weather events will compound our problems exponentially. We cannot afford to ignore the elephant in the room any longer! It is imperative that we work towards solving the climate crisis. But before a problem can be  solved, it is necessary to define and fully understand it and its many implications. Put another way, it is essential to create a reckoning.

My collages on ledgers are literal reckonings of our past and present and expressions of the weight of my grief over the environmental changes we are witnessing. During the course of my research I discovered I am suffering from solastalgia, a recently coined term to describe emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change.

The antique ledgers serve as a historical snapshot of the mundane, such as food purchases and inventories. By working atop these ledgers, I am collaborating with people of the past and building another layer of human history, while pondering how we arrived at this point, our similarities and our differences in relation to the people that lived before us.

Each collage, featuring the Earth in various states of orbital stability, employs intricately cut paper from a multitude of sources and time periods to create surreal scenes. The placement of each symbolic element is carefully considered in terms of compositional balance and response to the existing marks upon the page. Several of the larger ledgers’ backgrounds are painted, creating context for the collages, much like a diorama one might see in a natural history museum.

The hands in both the collages and installations reference work, action, discord, help, protection, and pleas for help, while the feet refer to movement, trouble, and even tantrums. Other characters include a simultaneously protective and vengeful mother Earth, her children (us), and birds and butterflies asking us to consider their plight while offering hope that it is not too late. The Earth represented by antique illustrations and vintage globes serves as a record of history, empires, colonialization and how we have changed over time.

I consider the installations to be 3-dimensional collages, which act as extensions of the works on paper. The installations are created using found objects such as vintage milk glass hands, antique medicine bottles, globes, flora and fauna collected in the DMV area and 3000 plus hand-cut paper silhouettes. Light and shadow become an important aspect of the 3-dimensional work creating another layer to the found object collages.