Solastalgia

I'm pretty much reflecting to reflect something that stimulates people's motivation to change something.

I lately have been checking with herders with farmers around the world that feeling of solastalgia it's a sort of nostalgia that means that feeling homesick when you are at home it's like feeling that nostalgic sentiment of seeing those grasslands and rangelands being transformed and having a negative impact on the environment and yourself.

Because at the end of the day, you are what you eat eats.

So if biodiversify original grasslands and rangelands is transformed to a monotonous environment for the sake and only the sake of production, that doesn't suit well with me or with other people that are feeling that so nostalgic feeling.

do not know.

So solastalgia is a term that this Australian environmental philosopher came up with maybe 20 years ago.

Solastalgia, it is the experience of homesickness, feeling homesick.

When you are at home, but home has changed around you.

So this would be the person who grew up in upstate New York and there were always ice rinks in the backyards in the winter.

We did not have a wildfire season.

So it's the experience of going home to Northern California and seeing the skies choked with smoke every summer.

Solastalgia.

But as our environment changes, we are seeing modern variations of this longing adapt to our current world.

For instance, have you heard of solastalgia?

Solastalgia.

Yes, it's a relatively new concept coined by an environmental philosopher.

It's a combination of the Latin word for comfort and the Greek word for pain.

They certainly do.

Um, in your Dark Harvest album, one song is called Solastalgia.

Mm.

And I was wondering if you could explain this word to us.

Yeah, I'd never heard that word, and I'm gonna try to use it this week.

Yeah, and there was another one.

Solastalgia?

Solastalgia.

So, um, not necessarily the work I made during masters, but that next 2021 show I think really, um, I started to, I guess, change the way I was using the paint, which aligned with some of these concepts and ideas much more solidly.

Uh, d- tell me about your 2022 exhibition Solastalgia, which as, as I understand, i- is the emotional or existential distress caused by a negatively perceived change in your home environment.

How did you convey that ecological loss?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... experience it and feel it, and feel the devastation and the loss.

And so that exhibition, Solastalgia, came out of that, that trip, and I guess also the research too, like wanting to, I guess, convey or talk about how Australian landscape painting now can have a role in celebrating the beauty of our landscape and the fra- fragility of our landscape, and, and how, like, that- that's an important place for painting to be.

So I didn't want the painting to, you know, hit people in the face as doom.