Silence by Louisa Hopcroft

Caught amidst a ‘bad dream’ with little control over a collapsing environment, I have become aware of an imposed silence, constraining and inflicting a sense of airlessness.
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”1

A reminder of constraint and loss and longing, this excerpt from Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, moved me to create a series of paintings which consider exploitative attitudes to the environment and the resulting effects on its valuation – species extinctions, biodiversity devastation, and exponential ecological collapse. Of particular focus are New Zealand bird species and their decline.

1 Plath, Sylvia. «Twenty.» In The Bell Jar: A Novel, 124. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.

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