This works attempts to explore the complex relationships of the human and non-human, specifically the relationship of body (human and non-human) and landscape. Landscape was a central element in the colonial process. Tropical landscapes were the exotic ‘other ‘of the temperate Western world, an object of colonial fear and desire, of utility and aesthetics, a warm fecund paradise waiting to be plundered but plagued by pestilence.
The entanglement of disease and cultural contact plays out in the story of the ‘fever tree’, or the Cinchona tree, native to South America, the bark of which was used to produce quinine, a cure for malaria, until more efficient drugs were synthesized in the 1940s. By the mid-1850s, the British had successfully established “fever tree” plantations in the Nilgiri hills of southern India, where malaria was rampant, eventually enabling Europeans to combat malaria and colonize Africa, India and other tropical countries.
This work, conceived as a fractured contemporary landscape, is drawn and appliqued with iron rust, a metallic mordant that bites into and disintegrates the cotton fiber over time, mirroring the scorched, charred, burnt and damaged landscapes that are increasingly becoming our reality.
The inevitable ecological catastrophe that the planet is being plunged into, should compel us to question human hubris and reconsider our place in the evolution of life on Earth. It would serve us to remember that even a small insignificant mosquito, can and has played a pivotal role in shaping the history of the world.