Industrial Spirits gathers eight animals that are already half gone — wild forms rising out of smoke and steel, dissolving into the very industry that imperils them. It is not a documentary series. It is a set of apparitions.
The need — a room that wants a conscience
Our decorator reads this collection as the statement piece for interiors that have gone warm and restrained but still want something with a pulse in them. The palette does the work: soot, ember, rust, cold northern white. Polar Bear Ghost and The Vanishing Flamingo hold a room the way a single oversized anchor is meant to — you stop, then the rest of the decor arranges itself around them. Warming up and Inhaling sit lower in tone and belong in a study, a library wall, a hotel lounge that wants to be remembered rather than merely liked. This is not soothing art, and that is precisely its use: one wall that refuses to be background.
The production — smoke as a drawing tool
The art director built the whole series on a single rule: the animal is never fully there. Vapour, particulate, industrial haze are treated as the medium rather than the backdrop, so each creature is drawn by what is erasing it. A Final Glance and Wrapped life push that furthest — silhouettes reclaimed by their own atmosphere, edges left unresolved on purpose. Building the future for you and Nourishing turn the irony outward, setting the language of progress against what it costs. The soft-focus, grain-heavy treatment is deliberate: an image that refuses sharpness makes the viewer finish it from memory. Mounted behind acrylic glass, the smoke gains real depth — the greys separate into layers instead of collapsing into flat murk, and the light seems to come from inside the haze.
The sale — the subject collectors actually live with
Our gallerist points to a simple market fact: ecology has moved from cause to genre. Buyers who would never hang a poster about a cause will hang a beautiful, ambiguous animal that carries the same argument without raising its voice. That is what these eight do. As a suite, Industrial Spirits works either as one large anchor — Polar Bear Ghost or The Vanishing Flamingo on a wide wall — or as a coordinated series across a corridor, where the repetition of the smoke motif builds its own quiet argument. Museum-grade images, a subject with real staying power, and a coherence across all eight that reads as a body of work rather than eight separate pictures.
→ Discover the Industrial Spirits: Animals in the Smoke collection