I think of my life’s work as a celebration of all of nature, an orchestra that plays not the sounds of one musician, the music of one species, but rather an expression of all of nature’s songs.
Gregory Colbert
Colbert believes that there is a shared desire for all species to participate in one universal conversation. He sees nature as the greatest storyteller of all and himself as an apprentice to nature. His works are collaborations between humans and other animals that express the shared poetic sensibilities of all species.
Scientists can help us understand the nature world by giving us the “how.” Colbert believes it is the role of artists in all creative disciplines to try to inspire a transformational “why.” He offers a non-hierarchical vision of the natural world, one that celebrates the whole of nature’s orchestra.
Just at the moment we are burning down what remains of nature’s living library, Colbert is creating an intangible library of the wonder of the natural world that reminds us of what is being lost. He began his thirty-year project two decades ago and he continues to work with animals on every continent, making his works the most comprehensive interspecies collaboration ever created.
Roger Payne, famous for the discovery of whale song among Humpback whales, said of Colbert's work, “Gregory’s images return us to the sanity of our undeniable, unavoidable, inextricable connection to nature. And they do it with beauty, grace, lightness-of-being, strength. His images, like whale songs, are the last wild voices calling to the consciousness of terminally civilized humanity, our last contact with nature before we submerge forever in our own manufacture and lose forever the final fragments of our wild selves.”