The Alpha Forest

Artwork currently being displayed as part of ‘Emergence’ an exhibition in Barnsley Town Centre, until 5 September 2009

The Alpha Forest (2009, mixed media)

The ‘Alpha Forest’ is a global hegemony, anything different living in the forest, anything not following the route, cannot survive. All the hands point up competing to be the best, the pyramids of the global corporations dominate and are pushed to the top by the forest. The drawing portrays an eventual extinction of the human race in its blinkered pursuit of power and wealth. Corporate Capitalism, as a World order, will lead to the destruction of civilisation.

Further reading…

Being a lover of woodland, I have never been enthusiastic about plantation woodlands (woodland planted by man for consumption) even though I see the importance of these woods. I see these woods, of straight and tightly packed trees, as a metaphor for the modern human world, where everyone is striving and competing for the dreams held up by the consumerist frameworks that surround us. I saw the self-seeded deciduous trees in the forest, twisting and turning in their struggle to survive and realised that, like the plantations, the system we live under is also blocking out all light for anything else to survive.The original idea for the man made forest started as a metaphor for my home town, and mine, and my friends’, feelings of alienation from the herd mentality. However I didn’t have the chance to pin this idea entirely on my home town because it soon became clear that the metaphor applied to the whole of the modern western World. We in the first world are being sucked into this competitive hegemony, dragging the third world down even further; down into this capitalist society where everyone is striving to be first and competing for more success, whether it is the perfect career or the perfect acquisition that is forever elusive, all of us believing, through the images we have been shown, that we will find our happy ending. Even people who are not chasing the perfect still have to compete in the forest, just for the means to survive, which is the unbending rule under this system. In this drawing there are block coloured pyramids towering above the forest of hands. These metaphorical structures are of an imagined -near future- world where super-corporations (each colour representing a certain corporate chain) have finally killed off all the competition from smaller and alternative businesses, making the population consumer slaves to their products. All the forest hands are tainted with a colour featured on the pyramid layers. These the different ‘categories’ people reside under that are tended for and tamed by the major consumer chains. Here in our found categories we are quite happy to be labelled, fed opinions and loosely controlled. The mounds under the drawing are the fossil remains of man-made waste, sedimentary layers of trash. I wanted the mounds to be a continuous layer underneath the drawing, but I simply didn’t have the space to do this. However after making my first mound, I realised their shape was similar to sandstone pillars marking the entrance to a park/woodland. I thought that the mounds could be the gateway to the forest, whilst also still being the sedimentary remains of the human species, the pillars of our existence. Hidden inside cave-like areas in the mounds are small drawings, they are a reference to my own lack of confidence -not being an adequate competitor in the alpha race – as these are a lot of the things I really want to say. The sketch drawings carry the bulk of my creative energy; they are the works I never believe are quite good enough; what I want to say the most rarely gets to see the light of day – hopes that have died in vain. 

All through my adult life I have been trying to resist joining a system that I knew would eventually drain me. This is a system that I have been told I have to be part of because “no other way works”, a world where I either give myself up and follow a ‘designated dream’ or I become another commodity.

The web of corporate Capitalism is stretching out across the entire world, rendering all alternatives obsolete. People usually associate the ideas of totalitarianism with strict communist states such as North Korea but I think that the global capitalist system is also doing a good job at delivering its own form of totalitarianism; in fact it is probably the finest method of controlling people. As long as it caters for mainstream and alternative tastes, making everybody ‘feel’ individual, and it throws around enough junk media information to dilute our attentions, the main questions concerning our real freedoms are will not be asked, or If and when they are, will not be heard.We, the people, have no real choice as to what kind of system we live under or what it does in the near future -such as the wars it takes our countries into and creating more ‘national security paranoia’ – we only have a choice in what materials and trinkets we drape ourselves in, in order to feel special and to express our ‘status’ in the forest of people. However, although consumerism works so well as a controlling method, it is doing considerable damage to the planet on which we all live, and if left unchallenged, may be our undoing. 

Though I feel alienated in the modern world, I am certainly not immune to the lures of consumerism. This awareness is a constant hurting, as I see my own part in the destruction of the Earth. There is no ‘holier than thou’ undercurrent here; my concerns are borne from my own failings as much as any other. People on a whole are not strong enough to resist the tentacles of consumerism and neither am I. A truly worthwhile switch from our current system will probably not occur until the people at the top of the corporate chain are either mortally or severely financially threatened, which would most probably be brought on by the effects of climate change. The change could happen soon, now would be a perfect time to challenge the global system, but being as the richest countries in the world are so keen on getting Capitalism ‘back on track’ to how it was before, it is probable that change will not come until it is too late for many of us lower down the chain. This drawing is my strongest explanation of why I dislike our current system of Capitalism and how close it is to delivering us into totalitarianism and environmental destruction. It is in no way a cry for Socialism and isn’t an attempt to encourage anyone to join a particular party or group; nobody owes their allegiances to anyone or anything. I just cannot see how the current system of Capitalism can continue to exploit the Worlds’ resources without utterly disastrous affects for us all.