Make room for an Elephant in your life

Tony Bishop-Weston | 20.01.2005 11:38 | Animal Liberation | South Coast

Artist Geoff Francis is donating the proceeds from all sales of artwork in 2005 to animals and wildlife conservation. More than 500 paintings from his private collection will be made available throughout the year, including his very popular abstracts and many early works celebrating and questioning our relationship with animals and the planet.

One animal who will be helped ia a blind Elephant call Jokia.

A lesson for humans? A blinded Elephant helped by another.

GEOFF FRANCIS
‘Art for Arks Sake’
18 January – 26 February 2005

PRESS RELEASE

‘Give an Elephant a Home, only a generous heart & spare wall space needed…’

Artist Geoff Francis is donating the proceeds from all sales of artwork in 2005 to animals and wildlife conservation. More than 500 paintings from his private collection will be made available throughout the year, including his very popular abstracts and many early works celebrating and questioning our relationship with animals and the planet.

Geoff has had a long involvement with animals and conservation. He was recently invited by Bill Jordan (O.B.E.) to become a Director of the Bill Jordan Foundation for Wildlife. Geoff has chosen a number of projects funded by the organisation to be beneficiaries of his generosity, including Elephant Heaven in Thailand run by a courageous young woman called Lek. Elephant Heaven gives sanctuary to elephants which have been used and abused in the illegal logging industry, elephants like Jokia, who was deliberately blinded in an effort to control her indignation at captivity;

Deliberately blinded by her owners, Jokia was pregnant and gave birth whilst being forced to work. The baby rolled to the foot of the hill. Jokia was unable to help because she was chained. Her baby died. After she refused to work, her owner used a slingshot to repeatedly hit her, and blinded her in one eye. She was sold to new owners who were told she was stubborn. They shot her in her healthy eye to discipline her, and Jokia has lived in the dark ever since. She is fed and looked after by an 89 year old elephant, Mae Perm, who now acts as her eyes.

‘The plight of these elephants says so much about what we are doing to the earth and nature, they are unassailable, but in the hands of men they are degraded’, says Geoff, ‘I want to apply some compassion’.

Other projects include helping to provide a secure environment for the Horola antelope in Kenya (there are only 300 left) by funding crucial anti-poaching measures. The Tsunami has created an urgent problem in Sri-Lanka, destroying a vital turtle sanctuary & killing its warden. ‘Sri Lanka is the place where I was introduced to the Buddha. I feel a great affinity to the country & those who inhabit it. Buddhist ideas form part of my abstract works, I would love to be able to use this to very practical effect by helping to re-establish the sanctuary.’

As well as launching a website there will be a series of running exhibitions of Geoff’s work, starting on January 18 at the Harris Interiors Gallery, ‘Nick and Caroline have generously provided the springboard to this endeavour by staging the first exhibition of the year’.

Geoff is available for interview and further information on his work and projects can be found at www.artforarksake.ukart.com

The Bill Jordan Foundation for Wildlife, Unit 4a Westlands Drive, Canford Cliffs, Poole, Dorset BH13 7LS. Tel: 01202 700 037, www.wildlifedefence.org, www.wildlifedefence.org

Harris Interiors Gallery, 33 Church Road, Lower Parkstone, Poole BH14 8UF.
Tel: 01202 744 081, E-mail: