by Erica Daborn

The project began in 2010. Returning from a sabbatical year spent in a quiet location in Mexico I found myself reflecting deeply on how the beautiful, natural world that surrounds us was gradually being decimated by human activity and our responsibility was going unacknowledged. Plenty of scientists had been warning about climate change for decades but their forebodings had basically been ignored. And at that time there was little press coverage.

I had also become disillusioned with the gallery scene. My work was never really appropriate for that kind of marketing, not sufficiently mainstream. So as an artist I decided that it was my responsibility to take the skills I had to somehow make a difference.

As an educator, I'd been teaching in art schools for twenty years, I found myself in conversation with young people who kept saying "Why is nobody doing anything about this? We've read all the stories about what's happening in the environment, extinction of species, catastrophic droughts, nobody in government seems to be doing anything."

It was their voice, their concern as young people, including that of my own daughter that galvanized me into action, figuring out a way I could be helpful. Through no fault of their own these young people would be living with the consequences of climate change. Well, the only thing I knew how to do was to make art of some sort.

So I devised this educational project to help people who haven't really thought about these issues to understand that we've all contributed to the problem. I wanted to show, through the work, that it is what we've valued as a society that has led us here. And because scientific facts don't work, I devised a series of visual stories that capture the imagination and bring viewers to explore the issues in an accessible form. Originally the murals were designed to be part of a more complex interactive installation, but as it became clear that they acted powerfully enough on their own, they have been exhibited in traditional museum venues.

Historically murals have been created to commemorate significant societal events: Picasso's Guernica: Iri and Toshi Maruki's The Hiroshima Murals; Diego Rivera's History of Mexico; Piero de la Francesca's Legend of the True Cross. The use of the mural form in Dialogues with Mother Earth places the viewer into the future looking back at quasi-fictitious documents of past disasters that we did not prevent. This serves the hope that we become alerted to taking action now. The textured surfaces and use of the most primitive of drawing materials – charcoal -- references man's earliest celebration of his environment: prehistoric cave drawings.

With this book I hope to fully bring the ideas embedded in these twelve images to a wider audience, and to encourage more people to take the environmental action that is so desperately needed now.

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Erica Daborn

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