Art

New Work 2025

The concept “Earthbound” refers to Bruno Latour’s claim that humans are ineluctably bound to the earth—that the Earth sets the final limits on what we may do, despite fantasies of realistically colonizing other planets. The first set of images focus on regeneration and our smallness next to the planetary. The tryptic below those entitled “Earthbound Man,” refers to possible futures and to possible ways of being on the Earth. Drought, fires, floods, or regeneration? Through my work, I explore the increasingly precarious and fragile environmental conditions that have emerged with the loss of Holocene stability. All species—with the exception of many humans—try to find ways to adapt and participate in a regenerative rather than a degenerative future. Through the medium of digital collage, using my own photographs plus borrowing an image of the Earth from NASA, I focus on both the lack of security and modes of adaptation to climate change, rising seas, increasing pollution, wildfires, and more. We must continue to actively create alternative modes of being on the planet in contrast to what has brought us to a situation in which we cannot take for granted the background conditions of existence.

Earthbound Man

Renewing the Forest Charter of 1217

The work below assembles eight collages [each 10 x 8″] and is a response to reading The Charter of the Forest of 1217, which restored rights to land and resources to “free men,” land that had been enclosed by Kings. This amounted to creating lawful rights to what one needs for subsistence or survival, and gradually it defined a “commons.” This Charter accompanied the Magna Carta and at the time was the more immediately significant document. No, it did not give rights to serfs, much less to women, who were considered property. But it did set the stage for more “abstract” rights later on, leading up to Human Rights and now environmental rights and laws. It also set the stage for conflicts over property rights, pitting individuals against each other and challenging the idea of a commons. Arguably, to remember, to renew, to rethink this charter now is to reconsider what counts as a “commons” in the Anthropocene, an age of planetary disruption and climate change. How do we, as “Earthbounds”—tethered to place, entangled in interdependent networks—manage our relationship to and with what we now realize is truly a commons, i.e., the Earth on which our and other species depend for our collective survival?