Despite the snow, our hardy artist Eleanor McGough braved the elements last week to bring her new work “Vital Signs” to the gallery!

This piece is even more stunning in person. Immediately you are placed in the ‘worm’s perspective’ looking up at the huge larger than life foliage. It is a summers day and deliberate striations layered in by Eleanor create ‘shafts’ of light that weave through the dense leaves. You can see triple and quadruple winged creatures buzzing across the surface and we can almost inhale the scent of the warm damp soil beneath us. Positives become negative shapes, allowing the background texture to come to the fore, leading the eye upward to the wider world above us.

“Vital Signs” speaks to the fact that insects are a vital part of our food chain, and that when you compare the amount of insects that ended up on your windscreen when you made your road trip in the summer of 1975 to today’s windscreen over 40 years later, there are significantly less creatures who meet their fate en route to Yellowstone. While in a small way this may appear positive, this piece asks us to consider how this overall reduction in number is impacting our ecosystem and environment as a whole.

They truly are “Vital Signs” that give us a clue to how the health of the world we live in is progressing, or rather regressing.