Acid Rain

“Acid Rain” explores the uneasy boundary between ecological restoration and ecological loss. The twelve panels depict standing dead wilding pines at Lake Moke, Central Otago, after being poisoned as part of an effort to restore the native landscape. Their pale trunks and dissolving forms rise through an unnatural green, purple and mustard haze, inviting an initial reading of industrial pollution before revealing a different story. Instead, without broadscale aerial application of toxic chemicals, the pest pines would smother the native ecosystems and drive native plants and animals extinct. The work resists simple ideas of good and bad. It lingers instead in the ambiguity of intervention—where death becomes an instrument of renewal, and beauty persists even in deliberate destruction.