Greta Thunberg
ORIGINAL SERIES
She was
a brat
Greta Thunberg was called a “brat” for being angry about a crisis she had been warning adults about since she was a child.
Greta began her school strike for climate action at fifteen. What started with one teenager sitting outside the Swedish parliament grew into a global youth climate movement.
As her platform grew, so did the attacks against her. She was called hysterical, dramatic, annoying and a brat. Her age, appearance, autism and emotional delivery all became part of the conversation — often instead of the climate crisis she was actually talking about.
She was a teenage girl speaking with certainty to some of the most powerful adults in the world, and refusing to make herself smaller or more palatable while she did it.
Her anger became evidence against her. But anger at something frightening is not irrational simply because it makes other people uncomfortable. Greta kept speaking anyway.
THE DESTRUCTION
Ridiculed
About the Work
2026
Acryilic on canvas
I took what began as a relatively soft acrylic portrait and attacked it with much harsher, angrier line work. The marks distort Greta into the image so often constructed of her: frenzied, irate, unstable and impossibly angry.
Across her face are insults and accusations directed at her publicly, including attention-seeking narcissist, which cuts prominently across the portrait. I wrote doom goblin directly across her mouth deliberately: Greta speaks about catastrophe, and much of the hostility towards her seems bound up with what she refuses to stop saying.
What struck me most while making this portrait was who these words came from, and who they were aimed at. Many were public attacks from prominent adults — politicians, journalists and other influential figures, predominantly men — directed towards a girl who was only 15 when her school strike began.
The angry marks aren't really about Greta's anger. They're about the angry, hysterical caricature that adults constructed around a teenage girl who refused to stop speaking.