2023-24
Oil on wood
60 x 90 cm

Jelly Green (born 1992) is a contemporary British New Zealand painter.  Her work is defined by her passion for the natural world.  Having spent extended periods immersed in the global web of bundles and rainforests from Brazil to Borneo and Sri Lanka to New Zealand, Green’s large scale works revel in the magnificent primordial canopies, while unflinchingly bearing witness to the brutal decapitation and destruction of the arboreal world.  Her most recent work is focused on the wild fires that threaten many of the earth’s forests: the paintings capturing the savage, elemental forces unleashed at the critical moment when the fire takes hold.

‘Around the world wildfires are growing in intensity. Animal and plant species are struggling to adapt to these larger more prolonged fires. Dry, wooded regions where people and wild lands exist in close proximity have grown especially dangerous as rural communities become trapped by rapidly spreading conflagrations. Few places are immune to the flames: Australia; Indonesia; Canada; Alaska; Western America; Chile, and Western Europe have all seen massive and destructive wildfires in recent years. Climate scientists have correlated the increase in size and frequency of these wildfires to the increase in global temperatures. These paintings are inspired by drawings and paintings created on the jungle floor, the tops of the canopies; from my imagination, from memories. They mark the moment that we face. A very daunting and disheartening one, but not one without hope.’