The FUTURE

The FUTURE explores a broad range of social and political issues surrounding war, immigration, climate change, and the consequences of human greed, excessive consumption, a wasteful throwaway culture and profound ignorance. Each panel represents a decade into the future but with connections to the present, with Brexit, protest, disarray, disaster and disease.

The post-apocalyptic narrative rolls out and back like the tides, the waves crashing and reclaiming the land. The devouring of fossil fuels and draining of the earth’s natural resources alongside mass deforestation, parallels social and class differences, leaving the vulnerable outside in the cold to fend for themselves.

Rising sea levels bring the ark ashore: the animals know the dangers but the humans are too blind, too deaf, too arrogant, too de-sensitised, to recognise the signs. When humans ignore what is happening, animals are reduced to skeletons and in time will be fossilised. Extinction of one species will lead to extinction of all species.

Lighthouses are a metaphor of the negative and the positive:  they signal danger but also show lights for navigation to safety. The transformation of lighthouses into treehouses symbolises this. When humans cooperate with nature they can coexist; cultivating their own food in collaboration with nature may lead to the re-birth of the planet.

This piece was completed just before the outbreak of coronavirus which spread worldwide in days. Maybe humans are not as mighty as they believe; tides are turning and all might need look to those beams of light in the sky (a sky now clear, cleansed from pollution as a result of the social lockdown). There, in the natural world and in the best of human nature, might be the guidance needed, as the rocky shoreline is navigated to a more harmonious future.

The FUTURE is now!