Factory Field

Marian Keeler

Factory Field

Acrylic on canvas

28" x 22" x .75"

2020

$1,900

Factory Field is the world of abundance, a fertile farmland, as it meets the effluents from a factory upstream. It is an imagined infiltration of unknown substances as they pass through and distort the life-giving potential of this land.

For the past two years, William Butler Yeats’ observation that “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” has held particular meaning for me, both in the context of climate change and in our pandemic world. The escape of the covid virus into the global community has highlighted our vulnerability as humans; it is as if our center is lost. Collectively, we ask if our world will be

the same as before, and if it isn’t, wouldn’t this be a good time to fix it? Wouldn’t now be time to examine how humans intervene in the natural world and how industrial structures can cause large-scale and lasting fragmentation to the environment.

As a painter, I believe Yeats could well have been referring to how human imposed systems and processes break down in nature, both destroying nature and being destroyed themselves. Factory Field is a response to these thoughts.