Charcoal engraving on board

122 X 85 cm Original  SOLD 

‘2 minutes to midnight’ is a charcoal engraving piece which brings forward the earliest times (as represented by the Southern Cross and the eucalypt foliage) in our Australian environment and then introduces its first humans 60 thousand years ago which inevitably led directly, through hunting and indirectly, through habitat modification and burning, to the extinction of most of the megafauna (represented by the marsupial lion fossil which vanished only 10,000 years ago).

This in turn wrought irreversible changes to the ecosystem which previously had sustained such rich and unique wildlife for countless millions of years. The final, fatal introduction of white people with so-called advanced technologies including firearms saw the broad scale extinction of many indigenous populations... (both human and other) and in the process took ecological destruction to a whole new level.

The global Doomsday clock is now set at 2 minutes to midnight. …..(Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.)