Earth Futures

Brad Necyk PhD., Canadian Artist working in Art + Medicine, UCSC Earth Futures Artist-in-Residence

An artwork is a birth of a new world, a world that warms and shelters, that gives and connects. It is a clearing, a free region to imagine otherwise—other futures, pain, hope. 

Today I sit, cross my legs, and open to the world: sensing the ocean air sweeping through the coastal rainforest, cooling with the approaching winter, feeling the collecting power of the Juan de Fuca and Pacific tectonic plates waiting to release a tsunami of force, clearing the itch in my lungs from the forest fires in California, Oregon, and Washington. The soil is wet and soft, the bed of new life, hope—my kid’s generation and their kid’s—and I meditate on that giving essence and look across the Pacific for an origin: the birth of a new world. A future. The future Earth, the living planet, from the iron core churning and generating the magnetic field that shelters, to the air filled with breath and ancestors, to the Hemlock I am sitting under towering into the cosmos. I put my hand on the ground and flowers spring forth that bath the world in colour and die in last night’s freeze. And so I sit and meditate on all of this and am creating this series of films in response to these arising sensations.