In UN/wanted, the thylacine rests upon the literal corporate paper that engineered its annihilation. The painting features historical bounty posters from the Van Diemen’s Land Company – an enterprise that commodified the Tasmanian wilderness for wool production.
Because of the thylacine’s passing resemblance to a wolf, the corporation immediately branded the native marsupial as an economic apex threat. In reality, the species lacked both the jaw strength and the instinct to prey on livestock. It was a corporate fiction.
The work serves as a sharp, allegorical autopsy of blind capitalism. To protect its immediate margins, the company escalated its bounties to desperate, astronomical extremes; by the end, a single dead thylacine could buy a trapper an entire house.
This painting captures that specific intersection of corporate greed and human desperation… a system so hyper-focused on quarterly profits that it eagerly chose to bankrupt an ecosystem. The creature sits on the very text that mandated its slaughter, a stark confrontation between the living subject and the bureaucratic machinery of its erasure.
Yet, UN/wanted refuses to be a purely bleak document of extinction. Instead, it captures the exact moment the global consciousness shifted. The tragic, rapid erasure of the thylacine was the catalyst that ignited the terrifying realization that human industry could completely wipe a species from the earth. This corporate slaughter inadvertently kicked off the modern global conservation movement.
Executed through a painstaking watercolor technique requiring hundreds of hours of intense focus, the pristine, controlled rendering of the flora and fauna stands in tense contrast to the thematic decay.
Amidst contemporary anxieties regarding ecological and societal collapse, this deliberate, slow process becomes a meditative sanctuary. UN/wanted is a study of capitalism’s hubris, the systemic rot born of rampant neglect, and the fragile, enduring legacy of an extinction that taught the world how to finally look closer.
The name “UN/wanted” describes how the Thylacine was simultaneously sought after but demonized, resulting in its destruction.
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WATERCOLOR: 18x24
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