Habitats from Habits
Ishanvi K.
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This piece is a representation of the impacts of climate change on marine and arctic biota. Just as human habits endanger habitats and drive many species to extinction, the woman is oblivious to the destruction around her, symbolized by the lack of face as it is masked with the roots of the tree. Much of the effects are shown in the skirt of the dress, including oil drilling, flooding, anatomical damage because of single-use plastics to testudines and seabirds, microplastic pollution, overfishing, and coral bleaching.
I used pieces of straws, utensils, plastic bags, rings, parts of bottles, and nets as the mixed media aspect of this piece. Along with these materials, I used gouache, watercolor, copic markers, and Prisma-colors.
The top section of a plastic bottle covers the woman’s face to serve as a funnel, and the barrier between the natural and synthetic worlds. I used the net to trap the fish, and clear plastics to show the suffocation of animals like walruses. The net is torn and represents the effects of overfishing and how it disrupts the food chain.
There is a straw lodged in the nostril of the turtle, along with a string of plastic trailing from the blood of the neck to the woman’s hand, as if she is unraveling it. The turtle’s shell is also fractured because of the injuries it sustained from being clogged with plastics.
There are various plastic parts that accent the damage to the many organisms. On the tree, red threads of plastic wrap around the branches to symbolize its entanglement.
Around the areas with oil, there are penguins and other birds, who are effected because the oil dissolves the water-repellent qualities of their feathers and causes them to die of hypothermia.
The tree growing on the head of the woman represents the remaining biodiversity we have left, which is decorated by the largest contributors to plastic pollution, like flowers made of plastic bags and Styrofoam microbeads as strings of pearls. I tried to mimic the texture of jewelry because they aren’t essentials, like artificial and avoidable waste. The tree is also illuminated to highlight this point.
The red net attached to the right hand of the woman, which is also pulling along various plastics that are tangled in like bottle caps, parts of forks, and pieces of straw, and conveys our necessity and attachment to synthetic products in our lives.
Below the flooding water, the corals fade from vibrant oranges and purples to greys, an effect of ocean rising. Ocean rising destroys the symbiotic relationships between zooxanthellae and coral, resulting in coral bleaching. She is standing in a pool of oil, which shimmers from metallic paints to create the illusion of a reflection.
I painted birch trees in the background because they are a good representation of a tree that is still prevalent through climate change as they can withstand a wider range of temperature.
The blue overcoat that blankets everything conveys that although each calamity has a different cause, they are all rooted from one and that is us.
Overall, I spent much time designing this piece and figuring out how to represent as many climate crises as I could in an emotive way, using materials and technique to convey expression.
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Art channels my passion for environmental issues in a manner that questions and integrates their offensiveness with their beauty. I seek to spotlight everyday climate crises that are perceived as inconsequential, and aim to challenge both the viewer and myself to think critically about these issues.
