Acylic on canvas
2026
Displayed with torn receipts
Where do the things we buy and use come from? How do they affect the world on their way to us, and after we are done with them? The more I learn about the systems we have created to keep us alive, the more I realize that they are also death-making.
Unnecessary suffering is baked into the labor systems which are particularly exploitative to prisoners and people in the global majority. Our ways of feeding ourselves create collateral damage in the form of insects killed by pesticides, sea creatures caught in nets, and cruelty in factory farm production. We take from the earth water we don’t need to fuel data centers, oil we don’t need which causes deadly leaks, and minerals we don’t need which kill those working the mines.
We are sustained by and sustaining more evil than we want to know, because the weight of knowledge, and guilt, are crushing. I benefit from these same systems which I also loathe daily, dragging my own complicity along with me. In reading about Indigenous Studies I came across the concept of being umbilically attached to the earth. It is a beautiful idea.
This is an inverse of it. The colonizer is umbilically attached to the suffering they cause. They walk on the bodies and pollution for which they are responsible. When faced, it becomes clear that this is unacceptable, that I am not ok and that no one is until we form relationships of positive and reciprocal connection.
Unnecessary suffering is baked into the labor systems which are particularly exploitative to prisoners and people in the global majority. Our ways of feeding ourselves create collateral damage in the form of insects killed by pesticides, sea creatures caught in nets, and cruelty in factory farm production. We take from the earth water we don’t need to fuel data centers, oil we don’t need which causes deadly leaks, and minerals we don’t need which kill those working the mines.
We are sustained by and sustaining more evil than we want to know, because the weight of knowledge, and guilt, are crushing. I benefit from these same systems which I also loathe daily, dragging my own complicity along with me. In reading about Indigenous Studies I came across the concept of being umbilically attached to the earth. It is a beautiful idea.
This is an inverse of it. The colonizer is umbilically attached to the suffering they cause. They walk on the bodies and pollution for which they are responsible. When faced, it becomes clear that this is unacceptable, that I am not ok and that no one is until we form relationships of positive and reciprocal connection.