The artist comments: "Air was a painting made in part in response to the death of David Bowie, Douglas Trumbull’s first film Silent Running which I had coincidentally rewatched at the time, and the ratification of The Paris Agreement in November 2016, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, made to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. At the time we probably all knew that the stranglehold the fossil fuel companies and their cronies had on our pathetically shortsighted and corrupt governments round the world, would mean that this blip of hope would be squashed and exterminated in the not too distant future. And my painting came out of the consequence of realising this, by cutting loose two figures into space as they looked out from their Forest greenhouse, housed by a modern day spaceship based on the geodesic dome constructions of one of my heroes, Buckminster Fuller. In the film, more interesting to me even than Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, a dystopian fable that came out of the Back to the Earth Movement in the 60’s and 70’s, was woven around the need to replant an alternative planet after a terrestrial catastrophe that destroyed Earth’s ability to grow plants, meant our hero Botanist Freeman Lowell, played by the brilliant Bruce Dern, had to carry our orphaned biodiversity off world in the hope of saving our species and Darwin’s Tangled Bank. The title of the painting, Air, in part from Bowie’s lyrics as his hero floated in a tin can far above the world, combined with the fragility of the glass curtain wall surrounding the figures which could be punctured and purged at any moment, I hope acts as a metaphor to how fragile our own biosphere is, and the ever increasing peril we find ourselves in, as all living things face extinction as we career deeper into the man-made effects of Anthropocene. Can’t we sort out and preserve our edenic life here without resorting to the piped dream of intergalactic travel?! "