Jochen Gren
Plenty at the Square

Exhibition opens Friday 4^th August
Exhibition continues until Sunday 1^st Oct 2023

Jochen Gren presents a series of mixed media artworks portraying a fictional reality which aims to provoke sympathy for our environment.

The artist is invited to visit a tribe living on an isolated island surrounded by the Amazon River. The artist is given conditions to paint the creatures and wildlife inhabiting the basin, but not photographically reproduce as the tribe believe that their souls, and the souls of the creatures would be stolen if they were reproduced any other way.

The tribe show the group of adventurer’s areas of land which have been logged out, then mined and the ground is now dead. To them it is proof that someone stole the souls of everything. So, for once someone lived by the tribes’ men rules and the travellers came away with these images. Sadly, the artist’s work was lost to time and has only recently been found.

This work triggered an idea to follow in the artists footsteps but sadly there was nothing there except for polluted land which seems the norm in the Amazon. The soul of the land was gone.

Jochen Gren is an multi-disciplinary artist and former jeweller from Bingley, West Yorkshire.