Symbiosis explores the relationship between humanity and the living world, not as something separate from us, but as something we are inseparably woven into.
There is a tendency to think of ourselves as individuals moving through nature, as though the Earth is a place we inhabit rather than something we are fundamentally made of. But the boundary between ourselves and the world around us is much less defined than it appears. The same elements that make up mountains, oceans, trees, flowers, animals, and stars also exist within us. We are not visitors on this planet. We are expressions of it.
The painting grew from that idea of interconnectedness and from a fascination with the strange relationship between the microscopic and the cosmic. We can zoom outward and become almost nothing against the scale of the universe, or zoom inward and discover entire worlds within something as small as a flower. At every scale, we are encountering the same underlying reality expressed in different forms.
The word symbiosis traditionally describes two different organisms living in relationship with one another, but I think the idea can be expanded much further. Humanity exists within a vast network of relationships that includes every living thing, the atmosphere, the oceans, the movement of the planets, the cycles of the seasons, and the energy of the Sun. We are dependent on these systems, but we also participate in them. What happens to the world eventually happens to us because, in a very real sense, there is no complete separation between the two.
The work also reflects on consciousness itself. We tend to think of consciousness as something that belongs to the individual, a private experience contained inside the boundaries of a human body. But perhaps consciousness is part of something much larger. Perhaps our individual awareness is one small expression of a greater living system becoming aware of itself.
There is something humbling about recognizing ourselves this way. We are simultaneously incredibly small and deeply significant. A single human life is almost imperceptible against the age and scale of the cosmos, yet through that life, the universe can observe itself, question itself, create, love, and wonder about its own existence.
Symbiosis is ultimately an invitation to feel that connection rather than simply understand it intellectually. To see ourselves not above nature, beside nature, or apart from nature, but within it. To recognize that the world is not merely something we are looking at.
It is something we are made of.