Ethos
Artwork that explores the relationship between humans and the natural world.
Artists found inspiration through the spiritual and emotional connections that individuals have with the Earth. The artwork explores how we interact with our environment and nurture the deep bond that humans have with nature.
Our Footprints
Violence. Her gentle face is streaked with oily blood
Regret, are the icebergs that flow until she floods.
Panic, is the clock that tells us we are out of time
Helpless, is what I feel because I am running out of rhymes
To fill the verses of the verdict of our numerous crimes
Against Mother Earth, left in the dust and grime
While we fill her lungs with greenhouse gasses and pain
And wash her blue and green skin with acid rain
Pouring down onto the ground
But with every storm there is bound
To be a clear sky reflected in the blue puddles
Look within and becomes less muddled
The ground we walk on is our own
The only place we can call home
Every step we make leaves an everlasting footprint
Each breath we take is a kiss to the wind
From the sky to the sea to the dirt down below
Everywhere is a place where we live and grow
Hard to imagine but this Earth lies in our hands
We hold an hourglass and we’re running out of sand
Don’t let it slip through your fingers
I’ll let that thought linger
One less car ride, one more clean breath
One less shopping spree, one less pile of waste
I told you, I’m running out of rhymes
But hang on for a bit
Our time here is finite
But let us ignite
A dream of what Earth we want future generations to find
And what footprints we want to leave behind
Athena Ma
Wildfire
I am over 3000 sunsets old / sitting in the back seat of our family minivan / it is the shade of open desert for miles / the stretches of land / its green abbreviations / we are returning from one of those cross-California road trips / measuring time by the intervals between each road sign / we’ve run out of things to say / we don’t make it home to the small town, off of Interstate 205 / instead, we become the tourniquet of the freeway / four hours of mending the earth’s grievances at summer’s height / smoke dressing the forest’s skyline, the way you would wrap a wound / or a memory / before the black clouds begin their inevitable inching / I’m too young to understand the weight of the word wildfire / old enough to know the flames were close enough to cosume us whole / now / we sit in living rooms and watch the news in complete silence / this is how we swallow the headlines / fire season is year-long in California / a state where childhood is synonymous with erosion / a family home sits abandoned amongst rows and rows of them / we watch forced evacuations / frozen freeways / now I measure time in the intervals before the next newscast disaster / no time to breathe / to let in sink in / we are sitting in living rooms watching the world burn / this is how we swallow the reality / climate change makes wildfires more frequent, feared, and resilient / in Canada, they are spreading coast to coast / like unforgiving open arms / relentless in their reach / just another kind of danger that demands leaving home / without any end in sight
Verma, Pujita
