Climate change and environmental catastrophe are the powerful inspiration for a new show by seven exciting artists
I Want You To Panic at Woodstock’s Zuleika Gallery sets out to explore the different ways in which we visualise our changing environment and what it means to be an artist living at a time of climate crisis. Taking its title from an impassioned speech by Greta Thunberg, it tackles the biggest physical issue facing the planet. Zuleika describes its mission as “exploring artists’ responses to the climate crisis through the actions they take as practitioners, as well as the messages they communicate in their work.”
It features work by Eric Butcher, Marisa Culatto, Andy Goldsworthy, Tom Hammick, Emma Stibbon, Ingrid Weyland and Rosannagh Scarlet Esson – who curated the show.
Oxfordshire painter Rosannagh – an award-winning Oxford Brookes University fine art graduate – is the ideal person to curate the group show, being admired and respected for her own body of work inspired by ecology, nature and the wilderness. She said: “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.”
Through a mix of painting, print and photography, the artists attempt to provoke and spur us into action.
The gallery says: “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.
“It 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.
“Rosannagh, meanwhile, paints with sequestered air pollution and materials symbolic of destruction to warn us of the trouble ahead should we choose to do nothing.”
Describing her work, Rosannagh says: “My painting practice comes from a deep and profound love and respect for wild, elemental places. They invoke a primal sense of freedom and belonging that forever calls me to the forest; to the mountains; to the sea. It’s that untameable, indomitable quality that I find so intoxicating. The wildness of it all. Even in man-made environments, my eye is often drawn to the lichen on crumbling walls, or grasses erupting through concrete - any sign of nature punching its way through that thin veneer of civilisation.
“These little rebellions are far more beautiful to me than any polished surface or clean, white space.”
