Possible Landscapes explores an emotional narrative of climate change and the transition to sustainability, related in the metaphorical space of a school classroom immediately before and after a vague cataclysm takes place. This work grows out of my past experiences as a climate activist and as an art educator working with youth at a STEM-oriented middle school. The classroom serves as a theatrical stage from which to launch into speculations about climate futures. The series is comprised of paintings, prints, collage, assemblage, drawings, digital art, artist’s books and wall installations.

Adult anxieties about the future of our climate frequently evoke children, both as subjects of angst (what will their future be like?) as well as of possibility. Youth are driving climate activism and the transition to sustainability globally, building coalitions to imagine and construct what’s next. I am interested in exploring this transition, with its intergenerational and ideological power struggles, as an act of envisioning and attempting to construct an imagined better world, a utopia.

A messy, crowded world is in dynamic flux, as vibrant smears punctuate pervasive smog. Within ethereal landscapes, school supplies meld into solar panels and wind turbines. The constructions are vulnerable and provisional, made hastily with objects-at-hand. Red Safety Scissors, seemingly playful and innocuous, dive bomb and shred the panels and turbines, which are in turn mended by benevolent reams of tape. Forms are linked together in tumbling daisy-chains, never static. As new weather records are set every year alongside unanticipated renewable energy breakthroughs, things are perpetually shifting underfoot. Utopias are hard to make.

Media: Oil on canvas, panel and dibond, acrylic, egg tempera, intaglio prints, inkjet prints, glazed ceramic, collage, assemblage, photography, installation, painted and stained found objects and wood scraps.