Beth Johnston

“Bill McKibben wrote, ‘We live in a post-natural world.’ But did, ‘Nature’ in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era. 

– Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

As an interdisciplinary artist and educator making work in|around|about|within the climate crisis, I am interested in art’s capacity to create space for the “unthinkable.”

Grounded in research on environmental justice, my work explores temporal chasms, climate data encounters, the decolonization of nature, more-than-human worlds, and how to visualize the imperceptible.

The following images are video stills from The Great Delusion, a visual essay exploring Western notions of nature from within the climate crisis. As we face unprecedented ecological disaster, I join Amitav Ghosh in questioning: 

“Are we deranged?” 

“Future generations might think so.”