Svalbard Archipelago Image © 2019 - 2025 Charles F. Pitz
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The reliquaries, shrines and altarpieces I create are focused on contemplating what is truly sacred in our world, in an age of human-driven climate change. They are my creative response to the experience of "solastalgia" - a homesickness and distress one feels when surrounded by rapid environmental decline.
Climate change is accelerating a century-long collapse in biodiversity in ecosystems across the world. Drastic declines or even extinctions of a broad swath of wild species are unfolding, in some cases wiping away creatures in a matter of a few short decades that have been evolving on earth for millions of years. Reptiles, salmon, butterflies, fireflies, bumblebees, coral reefs, songbirds, mammals of the savannah and jungle, turtles, orcas...the list goes on and on.
With a changing climate we find ourselves facing an unfamiliar existential threat...one that is altering the natural world we rely on so intimately, at an unprecedented speed. What is our responsibility to the other species that live on this planet? Are they collateral damage as we alter the world?
I’m unsure at this point if we have the ability to significantly evolve our behavior of how we live on this planet. I am convinced that if we are to succeed, it will require us to fundamentally re-define what we see, and treat, as sacred.
All my interests and skills seem to be colliding together in the artworks I make now, with these questions in mind. They are perhaps an eccentric blend of natural science, Wunderkammer, environmental philosophy, and the long history of devotional art. They are expressions of both wonder and grief.
The writer and naturalist Helen MacDonald has said: "We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them." Using techniques refined for centuries by artists across the world, I try with these works to convey the sense of an encounter with something sublime...something of immeasurable value. Perhaps the beings found in these reliquaries and shrines, and the tree of life they represent, will someday be revered as the marvels they are.
Climate change is accelerating a century-long collapse in biodiversity in ecosystems across the world. Drastic declines or even extinctions of a broad swath of wild species are unfolding, in some cases wiping away creatures in a matter of a few short decades that have been evolving on earth for millions of years. Reptiles, salmon, butterflies, fireflies, bumblebees, coral reefs, songbirds, mammals of the savannah and jungle, turtles, orcas...the list goes on and on.
With a changing climate we find ourselves facing an unfamiliar existential threat...one that is altering the natural world we rely on so intimately, at an unprecedented speed. What is our responsibility to the other species that live on this planet? Are they collateral damage as we alter the world?
I’m unsure at this point if we have the ability to significantly evolve our behavior of how we live on this planet. I am convinced that if we are to succeed, it will require us to fundamentally re-define what we see, and treat, as sacred.
All my interests and skills seem to be colliding together in the artworks I make now, with these questions in mind. They are perhaps an eccentric blend of natural science, Wunderkammer, environmental philosophy, and the long history of devotional art. They are expressions of both wonder and grief.
The writer and naturalist Helen MacDonald has said: "We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them." Using techniques refined for centuries by artists across the world, I try with these works to convey the sense of an encounter with something sublime...something of immeasurable value. Perhaps the beings found in these reliquaries and shrines, and the tree of life they represent, will someday be revered as the marvels they are.
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