Alared Landscape and Climate Change 
Reclaiming the Earth
 
Otobong Nkanga is a visual artist and performer. I admire how she embodies her work and makes it very physical. In her work, she erased the heads of the people so as not to focus on them. She said if she made the faces, she would have to make certain features which would lead to many associations so she decided to take off the people’s heads and focus on the physical gestures instead. “In my work, the people are not the focus. Nature is the focus. The people are meant to be very small in comparison to nature. In my piece, you cannot see anyone’s faces directly either. Everyone is either facing the side, turned around, or their face is obscured in some way so the focus is not on the faces. There are also a lot of spiritual  gestures like praying or bowing. I wanted my piece to symbolize nature reclaiming the land or reclaiming itself, the world and people having more reverence for nature. All the people in the photos are also monks or dressed in a spiritual attire to emphasize the coming back to spirituality in my piece.” 
 
Otobong Nkanga also did an installation called “Weight of Scars” or “scars of a landscape” where she took pictures from mining and put them in her piece. She wanted to highlight the trauma to earth as well as the trauma to the miners who had to work in those conditions. “Weight of Scars” inspired me to put pictures in my piece and work from there. 
 
The main inspiration for my piece came from Shara Hughes. She is an artist who works with all different materials. On the Louisiana Channel, she spoke about how everything is unplanned. 
“If I knew where the painting was going to go then why paint it.”
 
I love how she uses the element of chaos and using materials that shouldn’t go together. Hughes inspired me to take risks and start the piece. I felt intimidated and did not know what direction to take it and then realized that even professional artists do not have a plan. Hughes gave me freedom to explore all different elements and play with chaos which I think is relevant to climate change and Earth. Many of her pieces also inspired me to be bold and unusual. Hughes has a group of paintings about flowers which inspired me. Her flowers were not beautiful or delicate in vases but ugly at times and very dynamic. Hughes inspired me to be super creative and abstract. I felt weird making this and so the piece turned out weird. Hughes made me realize my artwork does not have to be “pretty”, it can be unusual, dynamic, and engaging which I like more. 
 
Hughes described her flower pieces as
“At first they seem inviting but if you were actually in this world it would be terrifying. They feel hopeful and scary…there is this push and pull.”
I hope my piece gives the same impression. 
 
Finally my third inspiration is an interdisciplinary mural artist named Madison News. I have always been inspired by her therapeutic work as a radical aliveness practitioner but her artwork is also very inspiring. She embraces disruption, anger, and not being “perfect” which gives me freedom to create. Madison News speaks about reverence for earth, bringing back ritual into daily life, and climate change. She has one work about her mother that was made from balloons she found on the beach. She has other works entitled “A Letter to My Mother” about her grief for mother earth and the negative impacts of climate change. In my work, I incorporated inspiration from Madison Nees by embracing my imperfections and creating a piece with imperfections. I knew this piece was not going to be “pretty” or “perfect” when I started creating it but it still made me uncomfortable. I love how funny it turned out though. I also incorporated Madison Nees into my working with the themes of reverence for nature, caring for mother earth, and spirituality.