Foresters, painting by Steve Starr

Description

‘Foresters’ is part of the ‘Foresters & Commoners’ series that seeks to interrogate, deconstruct, dissect and then re-connect esoteric truths, both personal and collective that are often hidden by our consciousness but are in plain sight in the natural world around us.

This series was created during the Covid-19 lockdown when the anthro-industrial world virtually stopped for a short while.

During the lockdown I began to think about the preindustrial world of England where my ancestors are from. Here people lived off the land gathering the food they needed from the forests, commons and the rivers. Capitalists forced these people off their tradition lands and stole the land and enclosed them for producing wool for the mills. The Forester and Commoner people had nowhere to go, so their drifted into the cities and towns looking for work and turning to petty crime to get by. Many of these people were arrested and transported to Australia as convicts. Perhaps rampant capitalism is the inherent problem we face?