Oil on canvas. 61 x 92cm

When I was a kid in the nineties, I had a poster on my wall that depicted a brightly coloured painting of a waterfall cascading among luscious tropical foliage and into a coral reef teaming with life, turtles, dolphins and multichromatic fish. When I was seven years old, my family visited Australia and I was enraptured to discover places that looked a lot like my poster, a lot like the books I had read and daydreamed about. Snorkelling at the Great Barrier Reef and exploring the rainforests of Far North Queensland was discovering that magic really did exist and I believe that no other experience has more deeply informed my love for this planet. The mass bleaching death of the reef is one of the deepest griefs that I have held in my body for a long time. To this day, I don’t know how to talk about it and so I guess I’m trying to figure out how to make art about it.