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Through my work, I’m trying to inform people where we came from, how we evolved,
and where we’re going.
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I want to contextualize how we as human beings compare with animals and how our behaviour is different. We have a lot of crime, violence and warfare, where animals mainly kill to eat, and don’t react the way we do. We seem to keep doing this over the centuries – millions of people have been killed, and I’d really like my work to help people to question why.
I don’t believe that the media can truly convey this. We live in the fast lane in our society and people don’t really have time to think about what’s going on. The news is created very quickly, it’s transient, here today - gone tomorrow, and onto the next catastrophe. Although it’s in the news at the moment, I don’t believe that people are truly aware of climate change and how it will affect our future, and future generations.
We need to be aware of the destructive nature of some human beings. That our DNA is the same – whether your black, white or yellow - we all come from the same chemicals and materials. By spelling out the consequences of our actions in a graphic form, this in the long term would stimulate people to ask questions about the environment.
What I would really like to see, is people become interested in using their hands again. Perhaps having workshops where people could create their own work and see art as part of their life. Art can be used politically or in many forms, but in our modern age we are losing the ability to make things ourselves – it all tends to be computer driven, pressing buttons, rather than taking lumps of clay and modelling figures or creating paintings. In our troublesome youth culture, it would help if they could express themselves through art as a normal part of their every day life.
I believe the answer lies in universal education in a really broad sense – not just educating people for jobs as we seem to do now, but to understand about the universe, where we really came from, what we’re made of... how we treat each other. Until we do that, we’re tied into education, politics and religion, and the result of that is 3,000 years of war in the name of who ever.
We need to think about each other and what we do to each other. Until we do that, we’re not going to progress.
There’s a quotation from Jared Diamond that goes something like this...
If we don’t take notice of the past, we will have no future.
I think he is right – what is happening in the world today shows just how fragile the system is.
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