Roughly 20 years to the day there was a news story that basically changed the way I saw the world. It was a story about an asteroid, that was given the name ‘2002 nt7’, being on a potential collision course with the earth.
Bizarelly this was reported on the BBC children’s new program ‘Newsround’, with the presenter at the time telling the kids, “but don’t worry, if this was to happen, it won’t happen until the end of the 2010s!.Well, I certainly worried. I guess a lot of us, especially if we develop a social, politically conciousness, go through an existential crisis. And this was my one. I was only 18, and deeply shy, so I kept it all to myself, to the point where I turned it inwards and had a very tough two years.
I never fully overcame these things, but’s that’s probably because the existential crisis triggered things that were already pre-existing. It might seem odd: what does a stray asteroid that was expected to come close to collision with us a few years back from the present have to do with developing a social and political consciousness? Kind of everything. It sent my brain into one big stressful internal philosophical debate about how the world should be, how we could stop potential future catastrophes, and how fundamentally we treat the planet, which in turn got me thinking about how we treat one another, in a society, a system.
qually, there’s the argument against projecting into the future horizons, and learn to live as well as you can in the present. And, I’ll be honest, over the past 20 years I could have done a much job at attempting that rather than worrying about this or that.
But equally, Nt7 2002, and 9/11 previously, triggered me into becoming the practicing artist I became. So I thought I’d share some of my earlier works from 16/15 years ago. Work that I often feel slightly embarrassed from for its naivety, but work that feels most timely in tune with thoughts on the lines of our planet, our survival, ultimately ecological thoughts.
John B Ledger 