Illustrator Kima Lenaghan‘s series “Homo Conscius” imagines an evolved place “where genuine and profound consciousness is found.” The artist’s solitary drawings offer both tangible and dreamlike elements, exaggerating aspects of nature and extracting them in sparse narratives. The “Stoned Ape Hypothesis” from ethnobotanist Terrance McKenna, theorizing that early humans evolved due to psychedelic mushrooms, serves as inspiration here.
“It exists in a parallel dimension to the existence of ‘Homo Sapiens’ (‘wise human’), whose presumed wisdom led to the creation and collective trust in an array artificial social and physical constructs that may have distracted from developing a deep interest and understanding of the universe,” she says. “The series imagines the people, traditions, collective dreams, discoveries, afterlife, and other details in this world as speculation, and as a eulogy, to human understanding that eclipses the scientific. These beings are empathetic, dream-oriented, and symbiotic with the planet, existing in works that spark reveries of a healthier dimension.”
See more of her work below.
