New Paintings | August 2020
Kayleigh Groves
Remembering the Future
Acrylic on Canvas
60 x 80cm
2020
For my new painting Remembering the Future, 2020, I imagined the trajectory of our planet's future post-climate destruction. What would be exposed when exploring for clues of life in the expansive dustbowls and rising tides confronting the future if humans did survive? Will they rediscover the microfossils of tiny fragments of single-celled organisms, plankton, fungi, and coral as they always have been? How would the memories of today's living natural world pass from lost and rearranged be re-interpreted? What about the life after extinction that was part of the symbiotic relationship that gives cause to the existence of our ocean life that gave no clues to its existence?
Like the missing pieces of a puzzle, we use memories and knowledge to establish our perception of the world to fill in the gaps with what we think is missing. Living things carry their histories and versions of what happened.
The theory goes that the dust that blows over the ocean from the African Sahara desert and reaches the Amazon rainforest 8000 miles away. There it rains down essential nitrogen to the shallow waters where it has built up as sediment that the Cyanobacteria feed on which then supplies essential nutrients for the kaleidoscope of organisms around the coastal waters. This has been occurring throughout geological history. In rocks that date back to the Archean Eon, there have been microfossils interpreted as Cyanobacteria.
This painting is a representation of what those findings might appear as 10,000 years from now, looking through a sort of microscope and interpreting the reanimation of life as a collection of memories of the future.
