Falling Sky

Jude Griebel creates intensively detailed figurative sculptures and drawings that visualize our entanglement with the surrounding world. In his works, landscapes, the species we affect, and the waste we create, coalesce in vivid forms that illustrate the reach of our impact on the surrounding world and consumption habits. Both harbingers of ruin and agents of transformation, his works build on art historical traditions of the anthropomorphic body to reflect a planet in a state of crisis.

Constructed on-site at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, the exhibition Falling Sky presents a series of Irish animal species, that are usually considered benign, presenting dire and apocalyptic warnings. The exhibit is positioned as a fantastic revolt by species whose habitats have been pushed to the brink of extinction. Placing doomsday signs in their paws, wings, and beaks, is a humorous and subversive way of disrupting comfort narratives regarding environmental degradation and climate collapse.

The personification of non-human species as a subversive gesture has deep roots in Western culture, proliferating in the upended, fantastical world of medieval marginalia. In the fifteenth century, German artist Israhel van Meckenem created an engraving of a gathering of hares, spit-roasting a hunter. Later, during the rise of entomology as a science, British illustrator L.M. Budgen drew protesting bugs outside a Victorian factory as a metaphor of ongoing civil unrest. In the 1960’s, cartoons of animals lent sympathetic faces to counterculture protestors. In our contemporary culture, animal mascots most often function as the friendly faces of corporations, permitting us to eat meats, fast food and sugary cereals. We are not as accustomed to them telling us what we do not want to hear.

The works in this exhibition build on these histories of employing the non-human animal to promote empathy, during this time of environmental urgency. Central to the exhibit is a pond of swans—commonly read as a symbol of serenity—foretelling impending doom. In another work, a procession of sprats (a species currently threatened by ocean trawling practices off the Irish coast) march along a shoreline, protesting the marine strain of commercial fishing practices. Constructed and carved from found woods, the works are finished in clay putties developed for use in the taxidermy industry, before being painted.

These works lean on humour and fantasy, ingrained in the use of animals in Western narratives, to deliver cutting and poignant messages. In doing so, they attempt to grant species independent agency outside of human desires and needs, stepping beyond the narratives we would rather attach them to.