Barbara Gooding’s work depicts leafy humanoid creatures in motion—dancing, parading, throwing up, and joyously running amok. Proud and mischievous, they are content to explore themselves and the world they create. We can access their world to mourn, memorialize, and remake the natural world we see fading around us in real time. Drawing on the collective dread of a disappearing landscape, this work is an elegy for our environment and an insidious warning of its inevitable wrath.

Made of hand-cut paper, the works are fragile, detailed, and cumulative. Deceptively serene at first glance, their essence reveals how crude, chaotic, and alive they really are. The creatures embody a carnival spirit, an iteration of the grotesque where life and death happily slip together in an indistinguishable collapse. The source material includes botanical drawings, field guides, film, animation, and artist and scientist biographies, all of which result in a rich and scenic story— the heart of which is that nature will always have the last laugh.

Barbara (b. 1991) received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Originally from Kentucky, she now lives and works in Queens, NY.