Crazy in the Coconut

Life seems to be made almost entirely of contradictions. How can I love handmade art and artificial intelligence at the same time? How can I create art that celebrates nature while using technology that consumes enormous amounts of energy and resources? How can I love animals and still eat them?

I was vegetarian for seven years because I could not reconcile myself with the industrial farming system. Animals were treated like units of production. Protein extracted like coal from a mine. Everything optimised. Everything efficient. Everything disconnected from the living creature at the centre of it.

Now we have animals on our own property. They have grass beneath their feet, sunlight on their backs and the freedom to express the behaviours they evolved to express. One day their lives end. I do not pretend otherwise. But if I am honest, I would be grateful for the same deal. A good life, a quick ending and a minimum of suffering. Nature itself is not particularly interested in fairness. A sheep torn apart by wild dogs or a porpoise slowly starving in a polluted river does not get a peaceful ending. We romanticise nature from a distance, but death in the wild is often brutal. The least we can do is offer respect while we are here.

The same contradiction exists in my relationship with artificial intelligence. I believe it is one of the biggest creative thefts in human history. The work of artists living and dead has been absorbed into machines without permission and without compensation. Yet I also use it. Not because I think it replaces artists, but because I am an artist with a full time job, a family, a farm and a finite number of years left on this planet. I use it the same way I use a camera, a shovel or a chainsaw. As a tool. A strange one, certainly, but a tool nonetheless.

My Visual Dream Journal is probably the best example of that contradiction. The images come from my dreams, from the most human place imaginable, and then pass through a machine before returning to the world as something new. It makes no logical sense. It makes perfect human sense.

The world keeps trying to force us into teams. Nature or technology. Human or machine. Artist or worker. Conservationist or farmer. But life has never worked that way. The platypus did not become one of the most fascinating creatures on Earth by fitting neatly into a category. It became interesting precisely because it refused to. Maybe that is the lesson.

The yin and yang exist for a reason. Light and dark. Growth and decay. Creation and destruction. Handmade and machine made. Freedom and responsibility. We spend our lives trying to resolve these tensions when perhaps the real task is learning how to carry them. Not perfectly. Just honestly.

I do not have answers. I have animals, artwork, dreams, daughters, paddocks, podcasts and questions. At this point I trust the questions more than the answers anyway.

To collect this limited edition digital artwork please drop me your email and I’ll transfer ownership and send you some art.