Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing. News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in. News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying. Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying.
We have 12 years to change our behaviour globally. We have 12 years left in this cycle of environmentally devastating, profit driven despair and then we will really have to fashion our houses out of flattened 44 gallon drums like the Mad Max’s and Waterworlds and Thunderstone’s before us.
Maybe too many movies about dystopian futures numbed us to the chaos we are living in now? Maybe they got us all ready to roll over and accept that “at least it’s not as bad as Minority Report” “At least it’s not as bad as Thunderdome” “at least it’s not as bad as Escape New York” except I read an article about America’s President and I felt like I was looking through a window directly at a screening of Back To The Future 2.
I’m only 29, but also I have been alive for three decades, I’m at a point between young and old where I feel like I’m capable of great empathy with a lot of people around me. I have children now, so I understand the individual decisions that people make to keep their families alive. And yet, I am also young and furious. I have memories from my childhood in the 90s of being warned about drought, climate change, the dangers of plastics. I have memories from my childhood about solar power and wind farms. I was alive for the tragic 90s 60s revival of love and peace. I have been aware, my whole life, that we were on an industralised long track path to devastation and its bewildering to me that our politicians, and industry leaders would still continue to put the impossible task of never ending profit growth before the literal survival of our species.
Of course, it’s not just about human lives. We have wiped out an obscene percentage of life on earth in a very short period of time.
We have been blessed with awareness and reasoning, the ability to use tools and teach recipes to our children. We live on a planet that up until recently was a perfect natural cycle of life. Everything is connected. We are so connected, so much more connected than we have ever been before. The internet is holding us all together like the massive and invisible framework of fungi that hold forests together. We have the technological ability to share ideas at a speed previously unknown to us. If only we weren’t forced to monetise ourselves individually maybe all our scientists, engineers, researchers, artists, writers, cooks, farmers, labourers, maybe all these people could work together to rapidly improve our world.

Nobody loses out when we all share information. Knowledge shouldn’t be EARNED it should be free, it should be available to everyone who wants it. Companies shouldn’t be competing to make better products than EACH OTHER and should instead be banding together to save the world.
Our governments keep us segregated.
Not just racially, culturally, socially. But also our brains, the way we are raised, trained, educated. We segment all our information into class groups. Maths, English, Art, Science. These things are not the same and if you’re interested in one you need not study the others?
Fallacy!
Everything is deeply interconnected, everything is both a science and an art, everything relies on maths, everything is social, everything is cultural. We can’t keep throwing “money” at individuals, and individual problems and expect to save the world.
Humans are not individuals, but defined by the space between each other. We are a web of life that, if we support each other, could, in mere decades, do anything at all.
Australia has such a terrible mental health problem that Anxiety and Depression are now So Normal that they don’t qualify you for a medical exemption from work anymore (even if cripplingly so). We have a social structure that lays all the blame for our mental illnesses directly on individuals. It’s your fault, it’s your brain chemistry, it’s you who needs behavioural therapy and medications and to spend $180 on an hour of head shrinking, once a week, forever. Despite studies that make it clear that social isolation causes mental, and physical deterioration, we still act like every individual'QQQs problem can be solved with an individual solution.
Science has been begging us to group together to solve these problems, we’ve had answers for years. That’s the most bewildering part of this whole insane situation we’ve wound up in! We have used wind to pump water since as early as 200BC. We have been using solar cells since 1956. Natural fibres came long before synthetic ones, and will be more feasible until the day we destroy the carbon cycle, or until the sun burns itself dry.

We have the capacity to live fully sustainable lives. Not just a cookie cutter facade of sustainability that comes with spending $14 on a bar of soap and only shopping from Green Companies, but a truly low impact form of farming and industry is absolutely possible. We create more than enough for every human on earth. We have the answers already, and we aren’t allowed to do anything about them because of a select few billionaires who will use our corpses to build fallout shelters before they would ever let us vote to take away their power.  


look up uncolonial history on ig & working class history on fb. 
check #foodisfree and see if you can find some community gardens in your area. 
buy, swap, sell, repair, mend.

What a blessing, what a gift social media is to the creative in this modern era. I can communicate regularly and in multiple media types with artists all over the world who are making similar works to me. I can reach out my hand and share ideas, works, concepts, data, anything, almost instantly with a thousand people who understand me. 

However, we still have to market ourselves, eventually we have to make money, eventually we have to survive. I hate this. I was raised on a steady diet of childhood crafts and books about Dada. Art and I are together, I am my work and cannot be divided from it. I started yet another instagram account. Why not, it's free right? it's all just data floating around in the ether. There is an account for every conceivable variation of the words "James Spader Official". I guess I thought that the digital art that I make almost daily as a form of idea development and thought processing wasn't "good" enough to be associated with my art? Maybe I just wanted a more outrageous online place where I could post sluttier selfies when I'm feeling the moment. I'm not really sure. 
I don't know how I will separate out the personal from the professional. I deeply resent the idea. 
I feel like I'm not allowed to be emotional, sexual, funny, weird or angry on my instagram account. Maybe I have to change everything I am as a person to make myself accessible to people who MIGHT buy some of my work. Maybe I have to change everything it means to me to be an artist?

Here are some thoughts from the last five days.