In this installation, I made human and animal figures peering out from the trees behind God in the left panel. This was inspired most prominently by the first image, one from Bosch himself in the bottom right corner. He depicts people trapped in a pit that a bird-human hybrid is excreting humans into after eating them whole. I originally wanted to recreate the ghostly dead feeling prevalent in his work behind God on the cover of the tryptic to have them witnessing his creation of the world, but obviously that was not possible logistically. Instead, they peer out from the trees to watch God create Eve still bearing witness to arguably his weightiest decision ever. For this I was thinking about the excerpts of Genesis we read as well as The Ambassadors and Morton’s Ecology Without Nature. Throughout the parts we read, Genesis focused on the ways humans sinned and God’s punishment for them. Obviously God is seen as divine and making no mistakes, but I thought it would be interesting to place beings in the trees watching God and judging him the very same way stories have him passing judgment on us. In the same way kids do not ask to be born so can blame their parents, humans (and other creatures) did not ask to be made so are blaming God for their failures. 

I connected this also to the constant looming presence of death in The Ambassadors and many of Bosch’s other paintings. The function of the amorphous skull in The Ambassadors, the skeleton in Bosch’s Ship of Fools, and more intensely his Death and the Miser all tell of the ways death is inescapable and constantly on the prowl. We discussed the clever way the skull is hidden in Hans Holbein’s piece showing how death is always around the corner and in actuality usually front and center with a weak cover just waiting to be removed. The Ship of Fools does the opposite. Up in the tree on the end of the mast appears to be a skull at first glance but is actually an owl. Here death is obvious but the punishment waiting after from the sins in life are not, as for Bosch the owl represents the devil. The devil is hiding behind death waiting to entice you into hell. Death and the Miser, the most death focused of the three shows a Miser on death's door being pulled between sin and virtue in his last moment. This shows how we are in constant turmoil even as we die. God has made it so we are ever resisting and giving into sin no matter the circumstance. In some ways this feels acutely similar to Bosch’s painting and in others starkly different. Bosch depicts humans as they are created, sinning, and then being punished for those sins in his tryptic mimicking many biblical stories. On the other hand, the painting gives little sense of warning. It does not feel as though Bosch is warning viewers of the consequence of sin, rather he is depicting humans as they ‘naturally’ are and that is just the way it is. I introduced figures watching God to give a foreboding feeling of the inescapable while also using irony with those God constantly punishes watching and judging him.