PURE GREED

2008, Oil on Linen, 100 x 100cm

Finalist, 2009 Mortimore Art Prize 

The painting was conceived against the backdrop of the worsening water crisis and the increasing commercialisation of this resource in which the desires of corporations have been pitted against the needs of many - human, flora and fauna.

An issue that touches diverse communities from the irrigation dependent farmers of the Australian Murray/Darling system, to the peasants of Bolivia, (who saw their rates triple overnight when the municipal water was privatised to the US corporation Bechtel - a move which later led to the downfall of the Bolivian government) to the slow, poisonous and yet quite deliberate death of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan; this universal problem will be one of the major causes of suffering in the decades and generations to come.