Sarah Anne Johnson’s Painted Leaves, commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery for the Bernie Miller Lightbox, presents a detail of a photographic landscape overlaid with myriad fine details, earthly colours, and mystical light. Oil paint has been hand-applied to a chromogenic print of an understory of leaves in a temperate coniferous forest. The leaves are marked with decorative motifs in sunflower yellow, marine blue, flame orange, and brushed gold. Yet the image is an overture to humanity’s thoughtless imprint on the landscape.
The Anthropocene is an epoch where there are more trees growing in farms than in the wild, where more rock and soil is moved by bulldozers and mining than all ‘natural’ processes combined, and where the climate is tipping out of control due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal. Industrial capitalism is irreversibly altering the natural cycles of the biosphere; nature is now a product of culture. At the same time, carefully contrived patches of ‘nature’ lie open to the sky and to a multitude of uses and meanings in our urban landscapes. Flora is tamed and groomed into domestic symbols, civic showplaces, and national icons. In the age of the Anthropocene, many of us are sensing, as Ivan Illich called it, “the shadows our future throws.” These shadows are profoundly shifting our perceptions and yet many of our behaviours seem little changed. Johnson’s disturbance of the surface of the photographic image attempts to find the shape of hope in the shadows.