Earth is Old / Library Gallery / May 2 – June 27, 2025
Artist statement
Planet Earth is four and a half billion years old. After the first four billion, life appeared, tiny animalcules in a sea which then covered most of the earth. Countless life forms tried their hand at survival, some falling, some surviving, as the aeons rolled on. Flora and fauna in a million versions inched their way forward to become the plants and animals we admire today.
Each of these paintings celebrates one of the geological eras since Earth’s beginning – Pre-Cambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. I chose for each something about an era that appealed to me, whether a life form or cosmic phenomenon, or a painted ‘graph’ for getting my head around the hugeness of deep time. The ‘doomed’ dinosaurs reigned for 160 million years; 64 million years after their demise, little Australopithecus, our ancestor, rose, to begin a hunter-gatherer existence little changed for another thousand millennia. Two paintings about us, genus homo, form an epilogue to my exhibition.
To our planet, climate change is nothing new; there have been many in the past, causing extinctions great and small, and eventually, new species to replace the old. But this climate change we’re living through we can take credit for in large part. This should give us pause – the smartest species to arise, Homo sapiens – and seemingly capable of the biggest blunders! This is the cautionary and poignant part of my presentation. Perhaps by delighting in the wondrous march of evolution, giving rise to the beautiful world we call home, we can be better braced to try and rescue it from ourselves.
Just a note about encaustic, a paint medium you may not have encountered. Beeswax, melted down, is combined with powdered pigments to produce hot paint, which, when cooled, can be acted upon in many inventive ways – with scrapers, knives and trowels, then returned again and again to a malleable state with a heat gun. This is just the beginning – but what you see here is the result of all this creative play.
Sarah Petite, April 14, 2025