The Headwaters 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.

This particular landscape represents the headwaters up the Sucusari River where we traveled with the Maijuna hunters to conduct additional research. It took us 6 hours via boat to get up river to the headwaters, as the river got more and more narrow while we traveled deeper into the primary forest. Plants & trees hung over the river, creating a skinny tunnel for traveling and we often had to lay down in our boats to glide under the hanging foliage. This truly felt like the wild jungle that one thinks of when envisioning the Amazon, so densely biodiverse, with life dangling off every surface. These are sacred lands, and they are threatened to have the proposed highway corridor cut directly across them, cutting through the headwaters of the Sucusari, poisoning the rest of the river downstream that feeds the forest and the Maijuna.

$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!