While we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature - a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.
___________________ The layers of rock that are being created under our feet today will provide evidence of an unprecedented human impact on our planet. Future geologists will find huge concentrations of plastics, the fallout from the burning of fossil fuels and vast deposits of cement used to build our cities. The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years. We are causing creatures and plants to become extinct by removing their habitats. In just a few decades we humans have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in tens of millions of years. Our planet is said to be crossing a geological boundary - from the Holocene into the ‘Anthropocene’. Humans have left the countryside for the city. We have separated ourselves from the land we once roamed, and from other animals. But somewhere deep within us the desire for contact with nature remains. So, while we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion. A manufactured proxy for a world we once knew. This project examines humankind’s fractured relationship with the natural world, revealing not only a phenomenon of collective self-delusion, but also a craving for a connection to a world we have turned our back on.