A BRAVE NEW WORLD

Brave New World grew from my concern about the world we are leaving to children.Children inherit almost everything. They inherit our wars, our politics, our neglect, our ambitions, our mistakes, and increasingly, the consequences of what we have done to the environment. They are asked to carry the future without having had much say in creating the conditions they are expected to survive. That contradiction became central to this collection. But somewhere along the way another idea entered the work. For years I had heard people talk about the unexplored or untapped possibilities of the human mind. Whether taken literally or not, the idea interested me. I began wondering what might happen if the children inheriting this damaged world were forced by necessity to discover abilities that previous generations had never needed. That is where the lightning came from. In these works, some of the children have developed an unusual relationship with electrical energy. They catch it, hold it, fish for it, cook with it, and sometimes seem almost casually at home with something that should be dangerous. I did not want to turn them into superheroes. The lightning is not a magical reward. It is an adaptation. Perhaps the world they inherited demanded something more of them, and some unused possibility within the mind answered that need. The children in these works are not simply symbols of innocence. They are witnesses and survivors. Sometimes they appear vulnerable. At other times they seem more aware than the adults who placed them in danger. They watch, question, adapt, and continue forward through circumstances they did not create. Climate change is part of this work, but the collection is broader than climate alone. It is also about responsibility, indifference, power, and the strange human ability to recognize danger while continuing to behave as though someone else will eventually take care of it. There is fear in these images, but I do not think they are without hope. The hope is not that the children will somehow save us from what we have done. That would place yet another burden on them. The hope is that human possibility may be greater than we know, and that necessity sometimes forces us to discover what comfort never required us to find. Perhaps the real question behind Brave New World is not simply what kind of world they will inherit. It is what they may have to become in order to live in it.