A linocut print celebrating the little lives that recycle our world.
I've always been a fan of insects but in recent years I've been trying to learn more about them, their lives, their priorities. Turns out that this is way more than I bargained for, because the diversity of insect lives and lifestyles borders on the infinite. Insects have been structuring the territories around them for way longer than mammals have been around, and their persistent labor makes our world possible. I wanted to make a print that celebrated some of the vast cast of characters that make up the insect (and arthropod) world and their contributions towards taking everything apart- and putting it back together again. When you read about the contemporary collapse of insect populations around the world as a result of intensified transformation of the landscape, you wonder: what kind of future would be possible without them?
Specific to the dung beetles in this image: some years ago I learned about the crash of dung beetle populations due to the overuse of the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin (remember Ivermectin?) in domestic livestock- concentrations of this chemical in the manure of cattle and other animals kill off the beetles who gather to break down and recycle the dung- and what's left is a world of shit.
