This enchanting image forms part of the Jim Naughten’s ‘Eremozoic’ series, which will be exhibited at Grove Square Galleries in support of Fauna & Flora International. The collection name is inspired by biologist E.O. Wilson, who suggested that we are now entering the Earth’s Eremozoic period — an age of loneliness following the mass extinctions caused by human activity. With these images, the artist explores the inextricable relationship between humankind and nature, examining how humans have attempted to capture and contain the natural world and simultaneously proven incapable of understanding its full power and complexities.

Trained in both photography and painting, this ‘Gibbons’ image — as with all in the series — extrapolates photographs of dioramas of animals from natural history museums and digitally reimagines them in saturated colours and unnatural palates. By seeing the natural world through this artificial lens, Naughten manifests our rose-tinted view of the future of the natural world and our tendency to think of the environment that we have put at risk as a distant fantasy land. Through his medium of digital painting, Naughten challenges our sense of illusion, evoking a magical realism style to question the view of nature we are given through these dioramas, and the consequential blurring of our much-needed sense of responsibility to the world.

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