The Aguajal Artist Statement:

This torn tropical landscape is a part of my Lungs of the Earth Collection about my time spent deep in the Peruvian rainforest for the ACEER Foundation Artist Residency. My goal with this residency has been to create colorful artwork that shares the story of the vulnerable biodiverse rainforest and the Indigenous Maijuna community in their fight against a proposed highway corridor threatening their land and livelihood.

The landscapes from this collection share the beauty of the primary rainforest that would be lost from the habitat fragmentation which would occur if the proposed highway corridor were to be built in full, cutting directly through the Maijuna-Kichwa Regional Conservation Area (MKRCA) and titled ancestral lands of the Maijuna. The highway “development corridor” is proposed to be 10 km wide and 130 km long, traveling from the Peruvian city of Iquitos to Colombia. This construction would fragment the forest and open it up to uncontrolled colonization, deforestation and environmental destruction. The MKRCA protects over a million acres of primary rainforest that is a biodiversity hotspot and massive carbon sink vital in the global battle against climate change, and its protection safeguards the cultural identity and physical survival of the vulnerable Indigenous Maijuna who sustainably live off the land.

I illustrated these landscapes as floating islands with a torn bottom edge to represent the tearing apart of the Earth and ecosystem that a 10 km-wide highway corridor would cause. When habitats are fragmented like this, animal migration paths are severed, creating smaller and smaller isolated islands of native habitat, diminishing the natural resources that support the inhabitants of that area, including the larger mammals of the forest and the Indigenous Peoples who depend on the ecosystem for survival, like the Maijuna.

The palm-filled wetland swamps in the Amazon Rainforest inspired this particular torn landscape print. In Peru, these wetland swamps are referred to as an “Aguajal,” named after the Aguaje Palm (Mauritia flexuosa) that grows right out of the swampy waters.

There was an Aguajal nearby to where our group of researchers stayed, and I’d enjoy walking around it to discover many new-to-me chirping birds and insects. The best song was from the Oropendula bird that would make this distinctive call sounding like a water droplet—it was so loud at the Aguahaul because of all the Oropendula calls! I highly recommend listening to some Oropendula audio for your own enjoyment!

For the three landscapes that are a part of the Lungs of the Earth Collection, I developed some new metal type tropical plant life, including the new palm trees and bamboo foliage seen in this print.

I also included my canoe paddler design in this print to represent the Maijuna fishing in the morning in their handmade wooden canoes. I included the Maijuna in this landscape to show how the Maijuna, as an Indigenous community sustainably living off the land, are just as much a part of this rainforest ecosystem as the Oropendula are.

$10 of every print sold will be donated to the ACEER Foundation and designated for the fight against the proposed highway corridor threatening the survival of the Maijuna Indigenous Community. If you would like to help the Maijuna, the rainforest and help fight climate change, please also consider signing the petition at change.org — search “Maijuna” on their home page to find where to sign — thank you kindly!