Lately I have been listening to stories told by my father who has been around long enough to have lived off the land, without electricity, because there was no other option. Stories from a time before television and even before people considered putting locks on their doors! I admit I have idealized simple societies with simple ambitions, in small communities where justice is managed through a direct relationship with consequence. Where the work that people do contributes directly to putting food on the table. We now live in a time, in which there is a wealth of options available to us, in the areas of career, philosophy, values, romance, lifestyle, mobility ect. A time where social networking, has become one of the most essential survival skills and yet more and more we are paving over our soil with concrete because we don't have time in our lives to grow our own food. Instead we have it packaged and shipped to our cities from other nations. We don't have time because we are overworked, working jobs, which are often so abstractly detached from our own basic needs. In addition, our financial resources are spent more and more on services and objects that are designed to make our lives simpler, so that we have more time available to make more money to buy more things, that will give us more time to be entertained. This madness has taken a good idea such as the freedom to carve out our own little plot in the landscape of the economy and find personal satisfaction through individual passion and vocational design, and destroyed it by allowing individualist monster corporations which devour everything in their wake, to grow to the point where they rule the world, and exploit every resource they can get their hands on, be it human, or the land itself. We've all let this happen because of our greed and our sense of entitlement, and the effects of these crimes are overwhelming. I wonder how the next generation will deal with the wreckage? What could the forests tell them about the way things once were? As yet I'm not painting images of bunnies taking their own lives, but what I am painting is the stories of a natural world, which is trembling with fear.

Kelly Ruth 

photo by Tyler Funk