Telemorphosis, Second Nature

This project comes from a review of Anthropocene discourse It started as a way, through painting, to inform my response to the dual crises of climate change and ecological collapse. It became clear that mapping these crises would lead to a deeper understanding of their causes and those of the related emergencies of inequality and migration. Much has been written about the origins of our current predicament lying in western ideas of progress, their emergence in the enlightenment with the advent of humanism and their development through colonialism, resource extraction and consumption. Throughout the current and recent thinking on the Anthropocene a confluence is emerging around de-centering the human and in doing so making room for other living and non-living things. Rather than “humanising” the non-humans, post-colonial, feminist and queer theories allow for a recognition of difference and also for a getting along with our non-human neighbours. New Materialisms provide other, often oppositional, ways of considering the human in relation to nature both animate and inanimate and also our intimate relationship with technology. An ethics and philosophy for the Anthropocene is crystallising. This has been accompanied by calls for a new vocabulary to chart the collapse of the nature-culture divide. New figurations need to be found to refer to our post human embodied and embedded subjectivity. Finding a language for this new position requires creative thinking and an adjustment of perspective. This post anthropocentric turn is where my work is now placed.