Roger Steele: How Can Life Be?

How can life be? It can be a Norfolk Broad, teeming with life in the water, through the reedbeds and within the Carr Woodland. It can be a meadow left to wildflower itself, busy with insect life, blossom and birds. It can be sunshine and shade, still or windblown, warm or cold. It can be calm, peaceful and safe. It can be safe.

Does it feel safe at the moment? Does any of it feel safe at the moment? Do we feel danger inching towards us? Once again do people feel the fear engendered by dangerous, self-serving leaders? Are we caught again between the deadly ambitions of men desperate for more power? And do we all feel the heat of the war we wage upon our own planet?

And what a planet we have! Brimming with an enormous variety of life. Beautiful, dramatic, outstanding and unique! Infinitely entwined and connected. But one we have changed and continue to change, and now those changes burn through forests, rise ocean levels, flood dwellings and ruin crops. Chickens are returning home to roost.

Everything, children, women, men, animals, trees, minerals, the earth and all it contains seemingly just resources to be exploited. Leading us, dragging us, to where we now are.

In this exhibition Steele aims to grapple with some of these issues. With perpetrators and victims, with destruction and with areas, more or less, appearing intact. How it is, can be, could be, and should be.