Story behind the work: ‘The Ecosystem Expands’
‘The Ecosystem Expands’
2021. Oil on oil paper.
Long ago I read an article about a man who sealed a large glass bottle with plants inside. Decades later the sealed greenery were thriving so much so that the bottle looked as though it could burst. The sealed container had created its own ecosystem where the water and nutrients sealed within the vessel self-supported the life contained within.
One day whilst sketching in my notebook this image of the man and his thriving bottled ecosystem popped into my head. My mind made the connection to the practice of working on ourselves: on working on addressing our limiting beliefs and replacing them with empowering ones, of choosing to show up in an intentional way rather than automatically reacting, on focussing on what we could give rather than gain, on working on providing what we wanted to nourish rather than lamenting what was lacking.
Recently the same story of the man, David Latimer, with the thriving ecosystem in a jar popped up on my Social media feed (LEFT: Screenshot).
If you’d like to read more about the original story of this closed functional ecosystem (which apparently hasn’t been watered since 1972?) there’s more information at Bored Panda or at Modern Art Net.
I thought the practice of creating a strong inner ecosystem filled with empowering assumptions could be like that thriving ecosystem in glass, so strong that it might burst and flourish into the outside world.
‘The Ecosystem Expands’ is the result. It is a contemporary oil painting featuring a woman gazing down at a sphere rich with greenery. A large Bonsai-esque plant along with vines emerge out of a crack in the sphere along with a large flower. Water spills from the sphere. The light source comes from within the sphere illuminating the scene further indicating that this sphere, this ecosystem, is a life source.
I did play around with the idea of there being a foetus in the Sphere to connect with the idea that this Ecosystem provides a safe environment for development but decided this wasn’t necessary and suspected the addition might make this already Surreal image look more Sci-Fi than metaphorical. For those who might like this idea I left a hint of this concept: there’s a line (an umbilical cord of sorts) from the figure’s stomach that leads to what was the foetus in the sphere’s centre - it is faint though and reads more as part of the mass of flora greenery but I left a hint of it for people that care for it or for those that love to look at images for stretches of time and find new things.
I can hear my Science degree partner interjecting that in this painting with the plants spilling out of the Terrarium it is no longer a closed functional ecosystem and I think that’s the point - we can nurture our inner world hopefully to the point that it is strong and flourishing but ultimately when it is released and shared with the outside world that is also when it is vulnerable to and tested by it.
ABOVE LEFT: Photograph of the tiny original concept sketch in my notebook. The title for the work was already clear before painting began.
ABOVE RIGHT: Process photographs of painting ‘The Ecosystem Expands’.
