As an artist of the Anthropocene, my art comes from a place of tension. A tension that arises from my culpability in the climate crisis, my desire to raise awareness, and the constant guilt of creating. To create is to rearrange, uptake, and remove parts of the environment for the sake of something “new”. My art wrestles with this guilt and recognizes how the climate crisis harms not only the environment but also all of us. To create in a meaningful way then, I must imbue each piece with a part of this recognition. It is to say to the environment, to humans and nonhumans alike “I see this harm, and I am sorry”. In doing so, I propose a way to feel the Anthropocene.
“Right now it’s as if we are waiting for just the right kind of data, then we can start living in accord with it. But this data will never arrive, because its delivery mode is designed to prevent the appropriate reaction – we find ourselve in the midst of horribly confusing, traumatic events such as global warming and mass extinction, and we don’t have much of an idea of how to live that.”
-Timothy Morton, Being Ecological
Brooke Ripley is a multimedia artist who works with speculative fiction to represent the experience of climate crisis. In doing so, she unveils the failures of our anthropocentrism, our tendency to prioritize ourselves over all else, and how it ultimately harms us. Inspired by her experiences growing up in a rural farming community and her work as an advocate for low-waste living, she creates with radical care in mind. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design, with minors in Art History and Social Practice, and is currently a second-year MFA candidate at Ohio University in the Painting and Drawing Department. Her work has been featured by the Ohio Art League, the Atlanta Artists Center, and the Wild Goose Collective.
