‘We Are All Lichens Now’
Partnering with Lichen and referencing Scott Gilbert who proposed that we are not autonomous individuals, but complex, symbiotic, and multi species entities, ideas having been take up in contemporary environmental philosophy.
Seeing symbiotic lichen as a metaphor calls for recognising our necessary, co-constitution with our environment, and other living beings, to survive our current climate crisis.
The triptych format serving as a challenge to western notions of the self-contained, sovereign individual, following in the steps of Hieronymus Bosch in 1482 who replaced sacred subjects with warning scenes of hall and damnation in his Last Judgement and Oskar Kokoschka' apocalyptic triptych The Myth of Prometheus offered as a warning of men's “intellectual arrogance” expressing his fears for humanity after the second world war.
This triptych is offered to express my climate fears and by partnering with lichen my hope to move into our future in conscious symbiosis.
- the artist