In many of our lives, the life-changing effects of environmental abuse remain in the abstract. Lily Leaver’s art seeks to visualise the exploitation of the natural world, hypothesising a future dystopia of our own doing, based on topographical sites across the Western world.
This hypothesis is largely derived from George Bataille’s work, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (1949). In the work, Bataille interrogates the excess expenditure of resources and energy, criticising our excessive desires for exponential growth. For Lily, this cautionary tale of over-production can be enhanced by a visual counterpart that illustrates the consequent futures of Bataille’s theory. The resultant works of art are described by Lily as “Environmental Dystopias.” These “dystopias” are created through combining natural landscapes with austere, amorphic and eerie structures based on Brutalist architecture, and military structures which lend themselves to a serene yet post-apocalyptic atmosphere.
In the work pictured, Lily has depicted a Brutalist structure next to its ominous, grave-like void, which serves as a visual parallel to the extraction of natural materials. The impenetrable, abstract structure with no clear function illustrates the needlessness of our overproduction. The fence then acts as an isolating device through which Leaver distances us from the natural world ,holding us captive in the apocalyptic foreground. These features combine to construct imagined spaces that echo the effects of human consumption and contrast them within the landscape.
Intaglio printmaking, which is her chosen medium, is a reductive process of etching away a negative image into metal plates, which are then printed onto paper. This act, for Lily, mimics the extraction and exploitation that her works desire to depict. In scraping away at the surface and reducing the material down to form her images, Lily has made her process an allegory for the exploitation of resources.
To create a metal sheet, one must engage in the exploitation that Lily seeks to criticise. However, to avoid the hypocrisy that this would cause in her work, Lily uses recycled zinc and aluminium alongside sustainable inks and repurposed paper. These found objects further enhance her work, as pre-existing scratches and markings on the metal lend themselves to enhancing the post-apocalyptic atmosphere of her scenes.
Through intense consideration of her imagery, materials, and methods, Lily seeks to fully immerse her work within her artistic and conceptual goals.
Image provided by Lily Leaver