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 rapid climate change. They are my creative response to the experience of "solastalgia" - a homesickness one feels when surrounded by environmental change.
As our planet warms and ice caps melt in response to the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, we watch a long-term collapse in biodiversity accelerate in ecosystems across the planet. With a changing climate we find ourselves facing an existential risk, one that is altering the natural world we rely on so intimately at an unprecedented speed.
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 art history, natural science, environmental philosophy, Wunderkammer, and devotional art from the past. 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 specimens found in these reliquaries and shrines will some day be revered as marvels.
As our planet warms and ice caps melt in response to the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, we watch a long-term collapse in biodiversity accelerate in ecosystems across the planet. With a changing climate we find ourselves facing an existential risk, one that is altering the natural world we rely on so intimately at an unprecedented speed.
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 art history, natural science, environmental philosophy, Wunderkammer, and devotional art from the past. 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 specimens found in these reliquaries and shrines will some day be revered as marvels.
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