The “Exile” in the title of this painting refers to the biblical expulsion from the Garden of Eden, as well as to our current self-imposed emotional exile from the natural world, as well as our predictable future exile from a world we made unlivable. When we were hunter-gatherers, we lived as part of the web of earth, immediately dependant and in dialogue with life around us. When we initiated farming that relationship changed. The very technology we began to use structurally altered our relationship with the earth. We began to shape the earth and use her to our own ends. That break in our relationship to earth has shattered evermore, as we feel divorced from our intrinsic relationship to the earth on which we evolved. Now we treat the earth as a whore to be used, or a pet to be sentimentalized, not realizing that what we destroy or deign to try and save is actually our own umbilical cord, our practical source of life without which we can’t survive.