The Generations Series (1 of 5), 1983

serigraph on illustration board, edition 3/7, 17 × 24 ½ in. (43 × 62.2 cm)

Wayne Eastcott's Generation Series is a carefully constructed meditation on the interrelation and increasing “interpenetration” of technological and natural worlds in human life. This sequence of images generally moves from darkness to light, and the prints oscillate between horizontal and vertical orientations (traditionally associated with landscape and human figures, respectively) with strong repetition and dialogue between them. Generation 1 and 3 have the same visual structure and imagery—a circuitry diagram, escalators, a man walking among leafless trees—but they are produced with radically different colourations and layering strategies, thereby creating sharply different emphases and implications.

Similarly, Generation 2 and 4 are composed of the same image set—an x-ray of a skull, a surgeon’s hand, leafy tress, a dense city street—but to exceedingly different ends. In Generation 5, the circuitry from 1 and 3 returns but is barely discernible, layered with new images of themes from 2 and 4, including a surgical theatre and dense urban housing. In a 1984 essay about this series, James Houston traced how the sequence pushes toward theological insight: “If sin lies at the heart of all human endeavour and all human creativity, so that all our expressions are ambiguous, for good and evil, then the presence of Christ must indeed be as the One in whom all things in all Creation coinhere. He is God as the Creator-Redeemer of humanity, the Technician who must enter into and encompass all that Eastcott’s art reveals, and much, much more.”

read James Houston's 1984 essay on Wayne Eastcott's Generations Series