Gaia's Suffocation
Siena R.
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My muse was the Earth, ripples in puddles and rain soaked soil, all smothered by plastic. The darkness of acrylic, layered like grooves in terrain, spanned organically across my paper. With darkness came light, oil pastels over rugged texture, creating layers and dimension through diversity of hue and chroma. Ripples upon soil were depicted through oil pastels on pasted circular paper, emphasis upon the light of the water that nurtured life below. Before expressing the life blooming, I expressed the life lost, pressed flowers laid flat on the surface, representing all that’s been lost to the suffocation of plastic’s touch. With the death of a bouquet came new life to my piece, stems creating movement below the surface and rose heads becoming the birth of life. Between life and death lies an in between: falling petals and dried leaves, losing their color slowly but surely. A sheet of plastic, already torn from the ceramics class, became the true symbol of the plastic that suffocates. Holes and rips represented gasps of breath from the Earth, punctuated by the salmon pink of raw skin around the edges of the holes. Gaia’s Suffocation speaks of suffering untold.
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In the moments when my heart sings a different song than my mind, putting a brush to a canvas or pen to paper allows my soul to be free. My art expresses the chaos raging beneath my skin, a riot of words and visual anarchy.
