SOLASTALGIA (I)

Scroll below for a picture of this work in a room

“Ever feel unease that the natural environment around you is changing for the worse? There’s a word for that,” wrote Georgina Kenyon for the BBC in 2015.

Philosopher Glenn Albrecht put together the words solace and nostalgia, to form the word solastalgia, to mean a “feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home.” “Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated,” he says.

Kenyon also cites The Lancet’s 2015 Health and Climate Change report which “discusses how solastalgia is connected to ‘dis-ease,’ or a lack of ease due to a hostile environment that a person is powerless to do anything about.”

I certainly feel all those complex feelings in the world we inhabit, though I attempt to change the “powerless” part of it.

I have made and remade this particular work over almost two years, making changes here and there, layering it and changing it’s colours. You’ll see some roses under a few layers, for instance. It didn’t feel right for a while, even though I had shared a previous iteration of it, calling it “a capricious season.” Well, I still intend it to feel like a capricious season to an extent but I see bigger context around it over time, and think “solastalgia” suits it far better now that it’s “done.”

I would like for the piece to paradoxically convey a sense of ease, in acknowledging change.

24h x 36w x 0.25d (inches); acrylic on slender canvas board made with a variety of tools; it can be framed to hang or leaned against a surface.