about the work

Boreal Forest Blockade, 2007
Genesis in the Retort, 2007
Hopi vs. Peabody Coal, 2007
Alison Pebworth’s work incorporate symbols and heroic figures from American history as they suggest narrative lines to explain our current predicaments. In her banner Genesis in the Retort, the three figures being cooked down in an alchemical process are taken from drawings by an artist who accompanied René Goulaine de Laudonnière’s 16th-century French expedition through what is now the southeastern United States. The fire is lit by Cotton Mather, Puritan preacher; the flames are fanned by Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president largely responsible for the forced relocation of Native Americans; and the byproduct of this mystical process is George W. Bush.

about Alison Pebworth

Pebworth’s drawings present Native American figures within the context of a legacy of the exploitation of land and other natural resources, pointing to the North American tendency to fabricate a romanticized, infantilized or over-simplified conception of the natural world and this country’s native peoples while simultaneously wreaking vast destruction on the same places or people. Pebworth’s Hopi vs. Peabody Coal depicts Hopi Kachina nature spirits in a despairing protest of the Peabody Coal Company’s contamination of Hopi and Navajo potable water sources. Her Boreal Forest Blockade portrays the longest running native blockade, the obstruction of a logging road to protest against ongoing clear-cut logging in Ontario, Canada (Grassy Narrows vs. Abitibi and Weyerhaeuser).

For more information, please visit www.alisonpebworth.com.