The World is on Fire and Nobody Asked Us

I’ve been quiet for a while. Not because there’s been nothing to say, quite the opposite. There’s been so much screaming inside my head that it’s been hard to distil it into anything coherent. But here we are. And if you’ve been paying attention to the world lately, you’ll understand why.

The world is not okay. I don’t mean that in the vague, Instagram caption kind of way. I mean it in the very real, keep you awake at 3am kind of way. Wars being waged. Rights being dismantled. The planet burning at the edges. And through all of it, the same rotating cast of powerful men making decisions that ripple out and drown the rest of us, people who never got a choice, never got a seat at the table, never got a courtesy knock before the door was kicked in.

The Machine Doesn’t Care About You

There is a machinery to all of this, and it runs whether we’re watching or not. Political systems designed to protect themselves. Economic structures built to funnel wealth upward like some grotesque reverse waterfall. Media cycles engineered to exhaust us, to confuse us, to make us so overwhelmed by the volume of catastrophe that we simply go numb.

And that numbness? That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.

A numb public is a compliant public. A frightened public is an easy manipulated public. And the people running this horror show know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve always known. From the bread and circuses of ancient Rome to the doom-scrolling algorithms of the present day, the method doesn’t change, only the technology does. Keep them distracted. Keep them divided. And above all, keep them from looking too closely at who’s pulling the levers.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. This isn’t tinfoil hat territory. This is just history

Tell Tall Tails - Without balance there is no peace

What Does Any of This Have to Do with Art?

Everything.

Art has always been the language of the powerless. When you have no platform, no microphone, no access to the rooms where the decisions are made, you make things. You paint things. You write things that scream the quiet part out loud. The history of subversive art is just the history of people who refused to go numb.

My work has always lived in the uncomfortable spaces, the dark corners where most people don’t want to look. And I’ve never apologised for that. But lately I feel a new urgency behind it. Because the world I’m drawing from isn’t some abstract dystopia from 80’s sci-fi. It’s just outside the window. The grotesque is no longer metaphorical. It’s literal. It’s on the news between the adverts.

Lowbrow art has always had punk in its bones. It came from the underground, from people who were told their work wasn’t serious, wasn’t legitimate, didn’t belong in the galleries and the institutions. And they said: fine. We’ll make our own galleries. We’ll make art that talks to real people about real things. We’ll make it visceral and strange and impossible to ignore.

That feels more relevant right now than it has in a long time.

The Decisions of the Few

Here’s what gets me. What really, genuinely keeps the darkness closer than usual. It’s not that bad things happen. Bad things have always happened. It’s that the bad things, the wars, the environmental collapse, the erosion of rights, the widening gap between the people who have everything and the people who have nothing, are largely the result of choices. Deliberate choices. Made by a very small number of people with a very large amount of power.

Think about that for a second. The scale of suffering in the world and so much of it is optional. It doesn’t have to be this way. The resources exist. The solutions exist. The will, apparently, does not. Or rather, the will exists only when there’s something in it for the people making the decisions.

We are collateral damage. We are the resource being extracted. And the system, political, economic, and social, is not broken. It is working exactly as it was designed to work. It’s just not designed for us.

Banksy - Monkey Parliament

So What Do We Do?

I don’t have a manifesto. I’m not standing here with a ten-point plan to fix the world. I’m an artist, not a politician, and frankly the politicians are mostly full of shit and out for their own gains.

But I do believe in the power of refusing to look away. Of keeping your eyes open when everything around you is designed to make you close them. Of making art, writing, conversation, community, that force the uncomfortable into the light.

I believe in not going numb. Even when it’s exhausting. Even when the darkness is heavy. Because the alternative, the quiet compliance, the learned helplessness, the ‘what can you do’ shrug, is exactly what they’re counting on.

My art has always been a response to a world that unsettles me. Right now, the world is providing more material than I know what to do with. So I’ll keep making things. Strange, dark, uncomfortable things that live in the gap between what we’re told and what we can feel in our gut is true.

The world is on fire. And some of us aren’t going to pretend otherwise.