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Inner Child/Climate Change ” x ” · Carbon pencil, blackening watercolours, and inks on paper mounted to canvas · [Year 2021–2025]
This painting places the inner child seated at a small table that has become a fragile island in a fracturing world. She sits quietly, surrounded by fish and other sea creatures pulled from their environment—some still glistening with water, others already dull and drying on the wooden surface. Fish, shrimp, and other sea creatures lie scattered among half-eaten shells, their once-living forms now still and exposed. The child’s hands rest on the table holding a knife, nearly but not brushing the edge of a fish as if trying to understand what has been taken from the water.
Behind her, the background splits into night and day: one half a deep, starless black that bleeds into the edges of the canvas, the other a harsh, over-bright daylight that feels too hot, too empty. The blackening drips rise from the table and the sea life, creeping upward like rising water or spreading heat, saturating the air around the child. Her face is unguarded—wide eyes fixed outward, expression caught between curiosity and quiet grief.
The work confronts the inner child's place in the climate crisis: innocence seated at a table of loss, surrounded by what has been pulled from its home, forced to witness the consequences of a world she did not break. The split night/day behind her reflects the unnatural rhythm of a planet out of balance—endless dark and relentless light, both suffocating in their own way. Yet in the deepest blackening, a tiny green shoot emerges from the crack between the table boards near her hand—the fragile, stubborn promise that even in the midst of what has been taken, something can still grow.
A meditation on vulnerability, inherited loss, the slow theft of natural worlds, and the enduring optimism that refuses to let the child inside us stop seeing, stop feeling, stop hoping—dark yet eternally hopeful in its refusal to look away from what is dying on the table.
Inquiries welcome for acquisition, studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com