All I See Is Ruins
2023 - 2024 series of paintings and mixed media

For more than a year now, I dream of ruins. Of human destruction, war, cruelty, the environmental climate crisis, and the last survivors. But in art and life I wish to move beyond, so I keep working through it and eventually find myself dreaming of rebuilding .

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In many paintings from this series, as in our lived reality, we are removing people from their ancestral homes and their daily lives. Unnatural ghost towns remain. Our imagination, our need to weave stories to fill emptiness, places a figure of faithful life amidst the rubble. The last survivor, a lone dog, lifts their voice in a desperate and defiant howl that bounces off the empty buildings. Whoever is left we will not go silently. I hope somebody hears. Similarly, in "Encounter at the Edge of the World" I ask what remains, who remains, at the end of civilization? Perhaps an olive tree survives where people have been uprooted. A loyal dog waits for their family’s return or returns to the wild themself. Light and shadow coexist in this mixed media painting conjuring an unreal landscape open for interpretation.

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The theme lives on in "Le Droit de Retour" (The Right of Return). Ghostly figures transition a dramatic breach between known and unknown, between life and death, between death and afterlife. If we are forcefully expelled from our home we always long to return and carry that hope within us. We may even pass it on across generations. If the right cannot be won in our lifetime, we console ourselves that our children might, or we will all see our loved ones again in our dreams or eternal rest.