After several viewings of Wall-E and a couple of History Channel programs, I consider myself an informed amateur on the speculative pseudoscience of the future. I use the near-facts in these sources as a springboard to conjure the imagery and implied narratives in my gouache paintings.

It is thought that it would take less than five hundred years for an uninhabited Earth to erase all visible traces of humankind. In my work, I whimsically investigate the absurdity of our relationship with the natural world. I am interested in our individual attempts to stabilize an environment that is in constant flux, and I aim to create a strange and wonderful world in which we are foolishly powerless against our surroundings.

I depict landscapes with collections of branches, logs, tumbleweeds, traffic pylons, and scrap lumber placed in landscapes in deliberate yet purposeless tableaux. I imagine these accumulations are the first attempts of posthuman installation artists, or perhaps the final attempts of the last humans, as if Jessica Stockholder were the protagonist in Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic odyssey The Road.

In a series of paintings of towers made of scrap lumber and cut branches, I deliberately avoid defining a single use for each construction. The towers are useless hybrids of diving boards and outhouses, sentry towers and mining tipples, pulpits and oil wells. In the wake of physics-defying Calatravas and Gehrys, I find it far more noble to pepper the landscape (if only notionally) with a development of ridiculous constructions made by unskilled, poorly equipped personnel.

I paint my imagery with an economical, graphic stroke and a limited but sophisticated colour palette. I aim to temper the weight of the subject matter with seductive colour and brushwork, to distill into playful near-abstraction the imagery of man’s last aesthetic gasp, and to create a world of gorgeous failure and polite futility.