In Western culture the landscape has long been our aesthetic backdrop, where nature is objectivised as something complimentary in a world fashioned by and for people. In the physical world, our dominion of the very ecosystem we depend on for life arrives at a crossroads.

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Since 2018 I’ve been working on a series of paintings that aim to join the familiar and the strange;

romantic vistas interrupted by abstract grotesques depicting landscapes inhabited by unfamiliar shapes that materialize parallel to the drama of their surroundings, touching on notions of nature, myth, change and fascination/abjection with geological deep time.

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The absence of any human life to contextualize these apparitions hints at a post-human era, possibly the

aftermath of the Anthropocene at the end of our future. Less a literal imagining of future life forms after

the planet having long since shaken us off like bloated ticks, the uncanny shapes that mutely stalk the

rocks and waters in these scenes seek to manifest a sense of otherness, loss of familiarity and separation as we are relegated from protagonists to castaway extras in the upending of our relationship with nature.

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While the feedback loops of a heating atmosphere, expanding oceans and pandemics are ramping up to imperil the existential sustainability of the human experiment, the anthropocentric primacy of the individual is threatened by an almost Lovecraftian cosmic horror; it is forced to consider itself as part of a species with a common, finite fate, set against a vast time scale that stretches out beyond view before and after our brief presence on the planet.