Meet Joe Dakin, a NH Artist who is using his art to speak to the issues surrounding Climate Change. Joe and I first met at Manchester’s First Mural Festival last year. He expressed a strong interest in helping present opportunities for emerging artists to be seen. In fact, he specifically “wished there was a platform like The Inkubator and InkLink’s Arts and Culture section when he was still in school.”
Therefore, I was not surprised that he was the first to volunteer to join our efforts at building out this new space. Watch here for future opportunities in our calls for new voices. Joe will be helping to lead the charge.
Joe Dakin: Background and Artist Bio
I’m an artist inspired by community and the world around us. I try to use art as a gateway for conversation, a way to say something but by using the mediums I use to create. I’m a printmaker by trade but currently following a path of photography and poetry, expanding to other methods as I discover them. A lot of my work typically focuses on our big problem of climate change. This is a topic I hope to bring to everyone’s attention, forcing the conversation. Nature is my focus, building a strong community through this conversation is my goal.
Joe Dakin describing the photos in this series
The photos you will see show the beauty of nature taking back man-made structures. It sends a powerful message that, without humans cutting back or stomping on nature, nature can grow and flourish. Nature can grow through the cracks and wrap around anything in its way. As a society, we constantly put ourselves above nature and the world around us, permanently destroying it.
Climate change is a problem that is close to being irreversible, yet it is completely our fault. We aren’t allowed to talk about it, even when we bring forth facts. There is a belief that it is not happening because some can’t see it with their own eyes. This series of photos was curated to remind you of Mother Earth and her struggle to live with us on her surface; to show how she grows back with grace and elegance despite the cruel world we have provided.
Why Poetry?
The poems demonstrate my feelings on Climate Change and are meant to make you think deeply about our planet. We only have one Earth, and no way of leaving it; the damage we are causing is nearly irreversible. Mother Nature is only going to take so much before something catastrophic happens. We build and destroy anything in our way, without a single thought to how it impacts the world as a whole. The air is becoming poisonous to breathe, the water is becoming acidic, animals and plants are going extinct.
Joe asks, “What are you doing about it?” And we are looking forward to seeing more of his take on Climate issues.
See his first installment MELTING ICE here.