Rebecca Hastings
If Not Now
2020
oil on polycotton
80 x 120 cm
Courtesy the artist and May Space, Sydney
'In 2019, an army of adolescent activists skipped school and took to the streets, demanding a halt to climate-change inaction. Their prescient protest ushered in a new world, with infection and inferno - once the stuff of biblical stories and dystopian imaginings - unfurling as retribution for our environmental disdain.
'Meanwhile, The Doomsday Clock - a metaphorical timekeeper - ticks inexorably closer to the apocalyptic hour.
'I am a parent, but also a human complicit in our unravelling. As they approach the abyss between child and adult, my charges are burdened with the aftermath of our complacency and the broken place that remains.'