THIS COULD BE THE STORY OF YOUR TOWN

We’re so lucky aren’t we? We turn on the tap and water comes out. We flick a switch and the light comes on. Rubbish gets collected. Supermarkets are full of produce which trucks deliver along functioning rail and road networks. Most of us can heat our homes, feed our kids and fill up our cars. Our infrastructure works. At the moment.

But things are unravelling: the planet is warming up year on year through man-made climate change; we have appalling levels of sewage in our waterways; decaying public services; roads full of potholes; crumbling schools; lack of policing; educational resources at risk; health service under huge pressure; incompetent government. Everyone paying more for less.

This painting is my view of where we could be in say, 20 years or so, when climate change has affected our already vulnerable infrastructure: flooding and high rainfall causes erosion, damaging rail systems and sanitation; higher temperatures and powerful storms disrupt transport networks, telecommunication, hospitals and overhead power networks. All the sectors of our infrastructure are interlinked and interdependent. Loss of infrastructure through environmental damage can have a significant impact on people’s health and wellbeing, and local economic activity. Damage to one sector affects all the amenities we take for granted.

This is one story of a possible future in this evolutionary shift that the whole planet is going through. In this exhibition I want to highlight all the tipping points the world is facing which are indivisibly connected to each other. Some have been irreversibly set in motion. We might think that as a developed country we’ll do better, but I’m painting the story of a global crisis. Locally, our towns may start to look like a war zone. We would no longer be a consumer society but a scavenger society.