I Want You To Panic

‘I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic. And then I want you to act.’

- Greta Thunberg

Zuleika Gallery is delighted to present I Want You To Panic, a group exhibition, curated by Rosannag Scarlet Esson, exploring the different ways in which we visualise our changing environment and what it means to be an artist living at a time of imminent climate catastrophe.

Taking its title from the famous speech made by activist Greta Thunberg, I Want You To Panic explores artists’ responses to the climate crisis through the actions they take as practitioners, as well as the messages they communicate in their work.

The exhibition’s curator, artist Rosannagh Scarlet Esson explains ‘we all have a moral duty to do whatever is in our power to push for a sustainable future, and I see more and more artists lending their platform to environmental causes. Art has, historically, played a key role in driving collective change, and I think we are starting to witness that in action. Artists are developing practices that counter the impact of traditional media, visualising scientific data, and amplifying the messaging behind both major and grassroots environmental campaigns. The problem is we are running out of time, and we need real, quantifiable action now - on a systemic, governmental level. Not next week, not next year, not by 2050 - now.’

Using painting, print and photography, the artists in this exhibition issue stark warnings about our time from a variety of creative perspectives: be it a reverence for nature; the use of poignant environmental metaphor; or drastic professional practice changes and sustainability commitments.

I Want You To Panic, which runs from 28 April - 22 May at Zuleika Gallery in Woodstock, includes Ingrid Weyland’s expanded photography series, Topographies of Fragility, which highlights the irreversible impact we have on the natural world; Tom Hammick’s monumental painting, Air, made in response to the ratification of The Paris Agreement in November 2016 and as a tribute to the 1972 dystopian science fiction film Silent Running; and the works of Eric Butcher, who has sacrificed making new paintings altogether, instead committing to a circular ‘waste not want not’ approach that recycles otherwise discarded material from previous projects. Marisa Culatto ponders on our futile attempts to hold on to that which we have already lost in her subversive icy still lifes; Emma Stibbon and Andy Goldsworthy demonstrate their profound respect for the natural world, the former through print and the latter through photography of transient natural sculptures; and Rosannagh Scarlet Esson paints with sequestered air pollution and materials symbolic of destruction to warn us of the trouble ahead should we choose to do nothing.