Linda Kosciewicz is passionate about nature and seeks to inspire greater understanding
and care of the natural environment and biodiversity through her art.
Babel 1 takes the iconic cautionary tale and image of human ambition and hubris as a
starting point to communicate the conflicts between the nature and the technological
world.
Chaos reigns where there needs to be harmony and integration. Linda’s Babel has a tree
as its main structural element, but this is blotted out by increasingly tangled ruined
structures which ascend skywards.
The architectural elements which smother nature, imply a dysfunction between human
technology and the natural world resulting in catastrophe. The architecture of Edinburgh
features in the image; Calton Hill and the semi demolished brutalist architecture of the
Royal Bank of Scotland building once on Dundas Street.
Birds are bellwethers for the health of nature, like a canary in a coal mine. There are
enormous egrets, a hybrid avocet man and a dove which in their way indicate the urgency
of the change in approach to nature that is needed. These were photographed on a
protected salt marsh in Portugal.
The larger than life, monumental egrets, represent a divining or foretelling of degradation
of the world. They scatter raising an alarm. The dove, symbol of peace, is cradled in the
arms of the central figure perching on the edge of the ruined building like a white flag in
war, signalling the time for negotiation and reckoning between nature and humanity.
The hybrid manbird walking on the rocks with the head of an avocet, logo of the Royal
Society of the Protection of Birds, symbolises the positive union between humanity and
nature. All the while, the chaos is witnessed by spectators in deckchairs in the
foreground, variously helpless in disbelief or seeking entertainment.