Zaria Foreman, an artist from Massachusetts, addresses climate change through pastel drawings of bodies of water and glaciers. She captures the devastation of ice due to global warming. I admire Foreman’s dedication to visiting the places she draws, such as Greenland, where she saw her first glacier, and Antarctica. By traveling to these locations in person, she helps her viewers feel her deep affection for these environments.
Ocean advocate Courtney Mattison hand-crafts sculptures made of ceramics to represent coral reef life within the seas. Mattison’s international installations present how much coral reefs and marine life are under threat. In her sculptures, What Will Become and Our Changing Seas I through IX, Mattison draws attention to detail and the use of color. The grey and white ceramic pieces, paired with the colorful ones, immediately stood out to me as coral bleaching. “It’s really hard to visualize climate change unless you can see its impact,” Mattison says to Earth Day Network’s Artists for the Earth campaign, “corals offer a really stark visualization of climate change because they bleach.” The striking combination of the coral’s beauty and its death is a powerful notion.
After witnessing a catastrophic amount of plastic pollution firsthand in Mexico, artist Alejandro Duran began to collect waste around the world to remodel into artwork. I love how Duran uniquely extends the photograph taken on site of painted and precisely arranged plastic to the floors of his exhibitions. Being able to see plastic from the ocean set up in massive amounts sets the reality of plastic pollution and its effect on our world.
Alexis Rockman’s oil pastel drawings transform our planet into one that has been destroyed by environmental pollution and climate change. Rockman’s Shipwreck collection is solely based on the biodiversity crisis and climate change, capturing disasters and ecology through animals as witnesses.
Lorenzo Quinn, an Italian sculptor, is the creator of large-scale creations. His sculpture, Support, calls attention to the rising sea levels that global warming has brought to Venice. Explaining his work, Quinn states, “I visualised the problem, I rethought the way I have to live my life, at least in part… in the end we’re humans and humans need to collaborate and come together.” His vision of communities reminds us that we do not have to confront these challenges alone.
