There’s something raw and relentless about Crispin Sturrock’s Foisting, a 2020 work that looms large at 106 x 183 cm. This isn’t a painting that sits quietly on the wall, observing; it’s a sprawling, divided landscape that commands attention and challenges the mind. With Foisting, Sturrock doesn’t just paint—he interrogates, he deconstructs, he lays bare the soul of civilisation as he sees it: fractured, consuming, yet reaching.

The left side of the canvas feels scorched, almost wounded, depicting humanity as a barren war machine, driven not by insight or intelligence but by base impulses: greed, control, and unchecked desire. The earth here is a stripped landscape, one where human ambition has torn away at every natural layer for power. We imagine ourselves as wise creatures, the apex of evolution, yet Sturrock confronts us with the unsettling truth that perhaps we’re just another speck of dust in a boundless universe—a species drifting along, shaping and, just as often, scarring the world to match our desires. Here, pollution clouds a muted sun, while faint traces of plant life cling on, resilient yet weary, in the wake of human aggression. It’s the earth stripped bare, and it’s the reflection of our species unvarnished.

#001 Nomenclature, 2020

Acrylic on canvas

183 x 90 cm / 72 x 35 inches

And then, a shift—Foisting’s right side is a shadowed depiction of the hidden war machine, the “civilized” apparatus of control and profit. Unlike the scorched earth on the left, this side holds a menacing sophistication: it’s the side we aren’t meant to see, the place where humanity’s most ruthless traits find their purest form. Corruption, violence, and exploitation blend together in subtle hues, creating an ominous tone of cold precision. This isn’t a tale of survival; it’s an anatomy of domination. Sturrock’s brush suggests something larger and darker, a hidden machinery that orchestrates humanity’s survival on a global scale—yet whose real purpose seems to be self-preservation through destruction, wielding power that consumes and disregards. It’s chilling and urgent, a visual reminder that such forces dominate nearly half of our planet’s future while shielding some humans, all the while targeting others.

But Sturrock doesn’t stop there. He subtly threads an undercurrent of our own existential call to expand beyond Earth, urging that perhaps it’s time to grow out of these primal cycles. He paints not only a confrontation with our violent nature but a reckoning with our choices: humanity driven to the brink, but now presented with a strange kind of hope. If we can create an alternative, a multi-planetary existence, then perhaps we might be able to unshackle ourselves from the primal flaws that have dogged us since the beginning. It’s a future where AI, instead of wielding destruction, could join us as an ally—a hypothetical companion in a journey to rediscover a new kind of being.

Foisting isn’t just a work on canvas; it’s a manifesto of survival and reflection, a plea, a provocation. Sturrock’s piece reminds us that art’s role is not only to captivate but to provoke, and in this sweeping, layered landscape, he leaves us with questions that linger and unsettle. Are we bound to repeat our oldest mistakes, or can we find another way forward? With Foisting, Crispin Sturrock is calling us to look, to reflect, and to respond.