Nature Strikes Back
Welcome to Nature Strikes Back
Nature Strikes Back began in the mid-1990s as a creative response to rapidly increasing environmental destruction and the underlying sense of human disconnection from our own ecosystem. It also came out of a professional realisation that the radically inclusive and constructive political thinking required to shift direction was absent for the foreseeable future. In the archaic and traumatic context of global 'power' politics and the prioritisation of economic acquisition and military dominance it will continue to be absent.
The project began with political collage pieces, and landscapes created with often toxic combinations of paint and household materials, using objects, board or paper found in the street. As digital spectrums and technology developed, industrial printer inks became a primary medium making the work more vivid and the landscapes more 'artificial'. I photographed and edited many of these works to create a series of prints in which the original landscapes became unrecognisable. From the mid-2000s, I worked with site-specific and themed installation works both internationally and in the UK. Much of the above is archived on this website while the blog is an irregular mix of reviews, travelogue and personal rant.
Following a house move in 2014, I started to work directly with raw, natural materials and plain, white acrylic. The subtle colours and textures in these paintings, and their sense of stillness and order, is a stark contrast to the constant movement and intense colour saturation of our contemporary visual environments. This series of works is on the recent painting page
Current and ongoing projects include 'Elegy', an open web project about death and dying, and the Crowhurst Art Garden, a small sculpture and art space in southern England. Both of these projects relate in different ways to the environment which hosts us. Our capacity for death denial in particular contributes much to our rejection of the practical and organic reality that our survival is ultimately dependent on the health of our biospheric host.
Valerie Grove
2024
Libraries Raised Me
Ray Bradbury