HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Printmaker’s meditation on trees beautifully roots out the effects of humanity on the environment
"Sharon Sampson’s focus is on trees, and in particular an old oak towering above the house she used to live in"
It is entirely coincidental that on the day I attended the opening of Sharon Sampson’s Circle of Life, one of the largest icebergs recorded broke off the Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Antarctic. But that is not to say the two events weren’t connected. The trillion-tonne iceberg is roughly the size of greater Johannesburg. Think about that for a minute. It may well start to fragment, as indeed may the enormous ice shelf from which it calved off — and if that happens (as it did with Larsen A and Larsen B), there will be a significant rise in sea levels. Scientists have been reluctant to attribute this latest Antarctic event directly to climate change, but it is nonetheless part of a disturbing broader phenomenon. Cycles of global warming and cooling in the last 700 years are a source of comfort to climate change denialists, but anyone who doesn’t have his or her head in the sand can see that humans are making things much, much worse than they would otherwise be. Living in the Anthropocene...
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