Zaria Forman’s Art For Change

In an age where the news is a constant stream of tragedies and fear mongering, Zaria Forman uses her art to tell people, not why they should be afraid of climate change, but why they should want to preserve the nature it is destroying. Thus, she creates enormous soft pastel drawings of icebergs that are being directly affected by global warming, while also drawing the Maldive Islands that are disappearing from rising sea levels.

Forman’s mother was also an artist, growing up with inspiration always around and art always being thought of, she traveled the world with her family, fostering a love for nature and sparking her journey as a professional artist. During her presentation, she gave a quick side note that the images displayed are her drawings; they are not photographs, but hand drawn pieces. She said that many in the past would wonder why her presentation on her art had none of her drawings in it when in reality, that’s nearly all the audience was seeing. Many of her iceberg drawings are rendered from photographs taken directly from a NASA shuttle by Zaria. In 2016, she was invited to join Operation Icebridge, a team that has been mapping ice changes at both poles for the last decade, finding that ice melting has tripled in speed in this time period. With NASA, she was able to travel to Antarctica and see some of the largest icebergs in the world, taking thousands of photographs for inspiration. She wanted to share this rare beauty with the world. In order to make people feel even more connected to to her art, she uses hyper-detailed techniques so her audience’s could feel more present and connected to her art and thus the nature itself. She wants people to look at her art and for emotions to be evoked, making them want to save these natural beauties and be more aware of their carbon footprint. Zaria dreams of creating humongous floor to ceiling drawings to completely envelop her audience in a landscape making them a part of the nature she’s drawn, knowing that climate change could someday take it all away, NASA supported that finding that Greenland’s ice sheet is at dangerous levels of melting.

She spoke about why she chose glaciers and icebergs to draw, and it’s because people often never experience being present with an Antarctic iceberg. They don’t have them in their backyard, so she wants to draws more attention to them, like the immense research that can be found in a mere air bubble in ice. The air within can allude to the age of the ice and can be used to reconstruct the temperature and the atmosphere at the time the bubble was formed, thus being able to see how much the climate has changed over time. The oldest ice core ever taken from an iceberg showed ice that was 2-2.5 million years old, and now due to rising temperatures, the ice that has truly withstood time is now melting away.  You can even hear it when in the Arctic, when the old air meets the new air it makes a small crackle noise she calls ice crispies.  But the icebergs are not the only suffering, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that it has been the 4 hottest years on record, there has been more crop failure, natural disasters, and higher extremes within those disasters.

However, it is not all doom and gloom, there is momentum. The Paris Accord, an agreement within the countries in the UN about greenhouse gasses, green energy, and the Green New Deal have been prompted. Sustainability can be a strategy. More people need to realize their responsibility to the Earth, and the generations to come after us. We must help the world to live on as there is no quick solution. Zaria believes that her art can help with this, bonding people together through their emotional connections to these drawings and driving them to want to better their habits and the habits of others in their lives.

Zaria is now even more driven after her mother has past away from brain cancer to carry on her legacy and travel the world to take photographs and use them to inspire more to fight for change. All around the world, her art has been exhibited, used in shows and plays, and she has spoken about her mission of grounding an audience with her art and creating a connection that will drive them to protect the nature so many are trying to destroy.