Poison Me Slowly
2023, produced during a DYCP funded research trip to India
Found fertiliser packaging and gloss paint. A series of 15.
This is a work-in-progress art work I conceived and created, while in my family village of Mazara Dingrian in Hoshiarpur, Punjab. It uses agricultural fertiliser packaging that I collected from a few houses in our village (including our own). I then took them to the village sign writer, to write 3 very carefully selected words on them.
Our village is a rural village, and our family and many other families in the village are farmers. Farmers, that since the green revolution arrived in India, have suffered severe soil degradation, diminishing access to water, political targeting, ill health, soaring debt, and tragic loss of life by suicide.
The intensive farming techniques that are reliant on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, fossil fuel powered machinery, and large quantities of water, have created a degenerative cycle that is very difficult to break.
This same pattern is visible in the marketing efforts and consumption patterns in consumer food.
The bright and shiny logos, packaging, and ads, hypnotise us to be complicit in our own poisoning. We know it's not good for us, but we can't seem to help but feed the machine.
It isn't accidental. It's very deliberate. It isn't about our health and happiness. It's about their wealth and their control.
'Poison Me Slowly' is my way to explore this complex relationship between the illusion of choice, colonisation of the body, self destruction, and care. It is born of love and a longing to return to more harmonious and ecologically natural times.