What pivotal moments or experiences led you to become an interdisciplinary artist?

Numerous pivotal points and especially people have led me to become an artist.

One of my favourite experiences involved a golden pig. Piggeswyk was my first public artwork in 2015, part of a Wild in Art sculpture trail for my hometown of Ipswich. In the ten years since then, I have painted and created sixty-something designs for trails all over the UK and raised over £160K for charities through the auction of those pieces.

Long before that, I had a misspent youth - not having a television, I spent most of my childhood drawing. All the children at school prophesied, ‘you’re going to be an artist when you grow up’. And they were right, though it wasn’t a path for the faint-hearted.

Most important were the people who inspired me, beginning with my Grandfather, who took up painting as a hobby after he retired in his sixties. The smell of turpentine still brings back memories of long summer afternoons spent watching him painting with oils in his garden shed, working on actual-size copies of some of his local Suffolk hero Constable’s landscapes. He went on to have a solo exhibition aged ninety and was still painting up until shortly before his death at 101. In his seventies, he used to tap-dance on the dining room table after lunch - much to my Grandmother’s dismay and mine and my brother’s delight.

It was my Grandfather who taught me how to draw convincing lettering in 3-point perspective when I was about seven. His handwriting was exquisitely beautiful. He had exceptional eyesight throughout his old age, could read intricate circuit diagrams and nutritional information on the backs of food packaging without glasses, and impressed on me the importance of always using a good light source whenever I was doing anything detailed. He made me a table-top easel, which I use to this day, along with a pair of ancient paint-covered bull-dog clips, which I inherited when he died in 2012.

From 1999 until 2019, I was privileged to work part-time as an assistant in the west London studio of children’s illustrator Jan Pienkowski (1936 - 2022). This came about through an artist reference study that I undertook at school, first at GCSE and again at A-level, leading to an enduring friendship with Jan and his partner David, who frequently invited me to house-sit their four-storey Victorian villa and look after their dogs, fish, poultry, plants and tame crow while they were on holiday. Jan’s studio occupied most of the top floor, with views over the Thames. I first attended life drawing sessions there - years later I co-founded a life drawing group of my own. Jan’s life drawing group met on summer evenings, with a different model every time, and a core group of half a dozen or so local artists. We would always listen to audiobooks or poetry during the session: the Just William stories, or Bleak House, or The Epic of Gilgamesh - remarkable soundtracks for life drawing, accompanied only by the sound of charcoal or pens or pastels scratching on paper and occasionally roars of laughter depending on the audio.

Jan and David’s home was a surreal and magical fairytale world, full of quirky details: a chair that sprouted claws and googly eyes if you sat in it, a life-size skeleton that hung in the printer room, a ‘lapidarium’ of random artefacts, ornaments, relics and even a bus stop sign that Jan assembled in his latter years at the bottom of the garden. No matter how busy we were in the studio, lunchtimes were always important and never compromised. Weather-permitting, we sat outside and shared a simple but wholesome salad lunch with homemade sourdough bread and organic local produce from the farmers’ market. Hearty conversation and laughter prevailed, interrupted by Sultan the cock crowing.

In 2015, I met my partner Jason, through our mutual interest in blades - Jason being a leatherworker and I being at that time focussed on scalpel papercut art. Our very first meeting was at a live speed-painting demonstration that I was performing at the Tindalls art shop in Colchester. Jason sat and modelled for a portrait from life. I painted numerous portraits of him in the years that followed.

Jason believed in me unquestioningly from the start, which allowed me to begin believing in myself. There were very few people who had ever taken me seriously up until that point, let alone believed in my ability to earn a living as a freelance artist, but it is wonderful to witness the magic that unfolds when you truly believe in someone. I also believed in Jason, with the result that he is now a freelance creative, with his own portfolio of more than ten public art designs and has raised well over £20K for charity since 2022. In April 2025, we celebrated ten years since we first met.

Across your expansive artistic portfolio, you work in several mediums, from speed-painting to shadow puppetry. How does your creative approach adapt when navigating such diverse forms of expression?

Switching art mediums is a bit like switching languages, because both are forms of creative expression. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m also a language learning addict and that I like to hop from French to Scots Gaelic to Danish to Latin to Arabic, much as I hop from acrylic painting to wire-sculpting to marker pen to paper-cutting to watercolour. It’s all about keeping on your toes, keeping an open mind, being experimental, being open to so-called ‘mistakes’, and communicating. Often, I find that a combination of mediums or techniques is required to achieve a desired effect. Each medium, each language has its own unique character. And it’s not only spoken language that demonstrates diversity of expression, but also different alphabets and writing systems. Studying the scripts of Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Amharic during a gap year before university opened my mind to the visual forms of expression of languages. My parents, teachers, and friends were all expecting me to study Fine Art at university, but I ended up graduating in 2006 with a First class degree in Arabic. As part of my degree, I delved deeper into Arabic calligraphy and was fascinated by the array of styles: formal, geometric, cursive, cascading. To this day, I still sense the lilting rhythm of Arabic script in every mark I make.

It’s the same when I dance freestyle: I deliberately set my playlist to random so I never know what musical genre is coming next, hence I switch from rock ‘n’ roll to bhangra to heavy metal to Irish folk to Italian opera - this literally keeps me on my toes and forces me to adapt my rhythm and style of movements every few minutes. It’s an excellent discipline in navigating diverse forms of expression. Freestyle interpretive dance shapes much of my visual artwork, directly or indirectly.

In your statement, you mentioned working freely with materials and tools, always striving to convey more with less, largely in the spirit of your Grandmother's maxim. Could you describe how this ethos translates into your material choices and artistic techniques?

My Grandmother was an amazing gardener and cook. One of her favourite maxims was, ‘Waste not, want not’. As a young child, I had to ask her to explain this to me, as the wording is slightly archaic. She taught me the value of installing water butts in the garden to conserve rainwater, throwing vegetable peelings on the compost pile beneath the laburnum tree, and never wasting food or ingredients in the kitchen. She told me of how, during the wartime, she had found a lump of fatty, oily cooking residue in the drain. “I couldn’t throw that away - that would be such a waste”, she said, “so I buried it under a rosebush in the garden, and the rosebush bloomed more abundantly than ever that summer.” She saved water from cooking and dish cleaning to throw on the garden. She grew most of her own vegetables and herbs, and saved seeds from flower heads to plant next season. In this way, at a young age, I began to understand about the cycles of nature, and how gardening and cooking are linked, and nothing need ever be wasted.

The timeless wisdom of thrift has stuck with me ever since, but takes on an urgent contemporary relevance in today’s context of the climate emergency. As a freelance artist, I now evaluate my material choices and artistic techniques at every moment, asking myself whether I could make my practice more sustainable by conveying more with less. Often, a project will dictate the use of acrylic paints, which I tend to be especially sparing with, as they are plastic based. The truth is that a little paint goes a surprisingly long way, especially if you choose good quality pigments, and since my painting style is all about atmosphere and subtle gradation of tone (as opposed to flat block colours), I can generally eke out the tiniest sliver of paint to convey all that’s needed. When I do end up with excess paint on my brush, I wipe it on my apron rather than letting it go down the sink. I get endless compliments on my apron as a result and even offers to buy! Experiments with palette knife painting have taught me much the same: palette knife is usually associated with thickly textured impasto paint, which is of course sometimes appropriate, but often I prefer to use nothing more than a smear of paint, pressing the blade flat against the canvas and moving it in circles, effectively wiping it clean as I do so. This technique effortlessly accentuates the subtle grain of the board or canvas that I’m working on and creates dappled textures that can be used to evoke atmosphere, or even paint an entire portrait. If you try this technique and it doesn’t work well, chances are you’re using too much paint. Knowing that many people tend to vastly overestimate the amount of paint they need, I always recommend using containers with airtight lids instead of traditional flat palettes for acrylics - these can keep your paints viable for weeks in between sessions, as long as you remember to replace the lid, and avoid leaving it over a hot radiator.

In the context of other mediums, the techniques may be very different, but the principle of ‘Waste not, want not’ always applies. When I assemble shadow puppets, I love the serendipity of using tiny scraps of paper to add details of clothing or hair to figures. I improvised a D.I.Y. shadow theatre out of a heavy duty shelving unit, attaching lamps, mirrors, diffusion screens and cameras where appropriate - this takes about twenty minutes to assemble or disassemble. When I sculpt, I repurpose the most unlikely items, including kitchen utensils, clothing, plastic bottles, broken jewellery, aluminium cans and other gems found on litter-picking walks.

When my Grandmother passed away in 2003, I funded the planting of a grove of trees in the Scottish highlands to her memory. More recently, through partnering with Ecologi as a freelance business owner, I have planted trees in the UK, Honduras, Madagascar, Kenya, Australia and the USA, restored UK wetland and wildflower habitats, prevented carbon dioxide emissions through the protection of the Mataven forest in Colombia, and removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via afforestation in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

You can follow my Ecologi impact here: https://ecologi.com/loiscordeliacom and for anyone who joins me and starts their own Ecologi forest via this referral link, you’ll automatically plant 5 trees in my forest, too! My Grandmother will always symbolise the wisdom of Mother Nature in my mind, and she remains an inspiration to this day. I am proud of every contribution - however small - that I can make for the wellbeing of the planet and all it supports.

Could you elaborate on a project that deeply embodies the theme of sustainability within your practice?

One of my favourite projects, themed very specifically on sustainability, involved weaving a giant Food Web for the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk, in 2022. I was one of eight artists commissioned to bring their concepts to life as site-specific outdoor installations for a new permanent riverside art trail. The brief had been to design a sculpture made predominantly of sustainable materials, specifically wood, metal, glass or stone. I chose to use metal, as I work a lot with wire, which I value not only as a three-dimensional drawing medium but also for its power to twist and tie things together and symbolise the interconnectedness of things. A strand of wire is relatively extremely strong, rather like a strand of spider’s silk, so it was the perfect medium to bring my theme to life. My sculpture takes the form of a giant spider’s web that extends outwards radially in three-dimensions, allowing the visitor to walk through an archway between two sections of the web and spot nineteen species of animal, plant and fungus embedded as smaller sculptures in the fabric of the web. The individual species represent some of the rich local biodiversity.

The web itself spans a space between several mature trees, circa six metres by five by four. Although I built most of each of the small sculptures in my home studio, I spent a few days at the museum working outdoors in rain and shine, up and down ladders, to assemble the framework of the actual web.

During the period that I was sculpting the web and its inhabitants, the museum was undergoing a significant re-branding exercise, transitioning from ‘The Museum of East Anglian Life’ to the more memorable ‘Food Museum’. With this in mind, I sought to emphasise the culinary theme, which made perfect sense for a web of life in which the flora and fauna are interconnected through food chains. I began incorporating food-related metal items: cutlery, food cans, tea diffusers, gravy boats, colanders, toast racks, wine racks, fruit bowls, and so on, into the sculptures, which made the sculptures much more relevant, fun and relatable, being composed of familiar domestic utensils. Hearing about my project, friends and family kindly donated old kitchenware for upcycling and repurposing, which inspired parts of specific sculptures. I included actual bird feeders in several of the sculptures, most of which still function as such, hence, the Food Web sculpture also sustains local wildlife with food.

When the Food Museum revealed its new rebranded logo, I was delighted to notice that the letter ‘F’ incorporates a fork, linking both with cuisine and agriculture, so I felt quite ahead of the game!

To see a short film of this project, please see my blog: https://www.loiscordelia.com/blog/2022/6/weaving-a-giant-food-web-for-the-food-museum 

The Green Man is a recurring image in your work. What does this symbol represent to you, and how does it connect to your broader themes of biodiversity, interconnectedness, and the fragile web of life?

These days, I tend to prefer the non-gendered, non-human- and even non-colour-specific term ‘foliate face’, sometimes ‘floral face’, referring very simply to a face that is surrounded by, hiding in, or composed of plant elements: leaves, foliage, fruit, flowers, nuts, roots, tendrils and fronds. In February 2023, I led a series of workshop activities on the theme of Purple Foliate Faces, celebrating Purple Friday by focussing on LGBTQ+ icons with a purple colour scheme. I encouraged workshop attendees to question their own concepts of masculine, feminine, man, woman, even human or animal - it was a perfect context in which to blur all those boundaries and allow beauty to blossom without restriction. The results were spectacular and demonstrated how diverse so-called ‘Green Man’ imagery can be.

Ultimately, the Green Man is a timeless symbol of rebirth or ‘re-greening’ in nature. Traditional iconography can be quite grotesque, suggesting the close interweaving of life, death and rebirth with foliage growing out of the orifices of the face.

I grew up in East Anglia, where it is part of traditional church iconography, notably in the beautiful gold ceiling bosses of the cloisters of Norwich Cathedral, but it is not unusual to find it carved into stone and wood, inside and outside old churches and elsewhere. Some people assume it’s limited to the Pagan spiritual path and are surprised to find it in churches. Some find it a bit too creepy - I must admit I found it creepy when I first encountered it, but somehow it seemed to take root in my heart and grow on me, perhaps literally, to the point where it has become one of my favourite types of imagery to explore. I have depicted foliate face imagery in two and three dimensions, in pen, coloured pencil, acrylics, watercolour, wire, pipe cleaners, recycled plastic straws and paper cut art, and painted it onto the three dimensional surfaces of statues for public art trails. I have based foliate portraits on famous and non-famous faces, animal faces, pet portraits (especially of pets named after plants, such as ‘Willow’ or ‘Jasmine’), skulls, and the illusionary eye spots of peacock feathers and moths. The more I explore the imagery, the more I relate to it.

Foliate portraits can have diverse facial expressions. Some are playful or mischievous, with Nature playing a game of hide and seek amongst the leaves. Some are comical, perhaps reminding us not to take ourselves too seriously. Some gaze at us in great earnestness, as if Nature confronts humankind and holds us to account as the planet’s caretakers, hence the ‘Green Man’ takes on an urgent contemporary relevance in the context of the climate crisis. Nature is no longer a faceless, impersonal thing, but a living presence that makes eye contact and doesn’t want to be ignored. To my mind, at least, this is why I find foliate portraits so moving and powerful.

It may seem incongruous, even creepy, to see a human or animal face made of leaves, but there is a deep significance to this combination. The ‘Green Man’ reminds us of our vegetable origins. Inside every one of us is a nervous system that - if it could be extracted and propped up - would resemble a tree.

Most importantly, we cannot live without plants - they feed, clothe, nourish and shelter us. They stabilise the earth on which we move, supply us with oxygen and purify the air we breathe. They bring spice, flavour, nutrition, colour, beauty and sweetness into our lives. We burn them for fuel, turn them into buildings, books, bank notes and bog roll. We seek to imitate their scents, fragrance, fractals and Fibonacci patterns. Their size and longevity inspire us with awe, their beauty with poetry. The ‘Green Man’ brings us face to face - quite literally - with this reality.

In symbolising the endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth and hence the way that energy - be it in the form of life or food or sunlight - flows in cycles and morphs into myriad forms, species, and dimensions, the ‘Green Man’ links naturally with the related themes of interconnectedness, the web of life and biodiversity.

During lockdown, you created workshop activities to boost wellbeing. What did you learn about the power of art to connect and heal during that time?

Lockdown changed most people’s lives. It changed mine permanently for the better, forcing me to slow down, cease a frenetic life of travelling and living out of suitcases, and instead live at a more sustainable pace. It taught me to apply sustainability to my own life energy and not just to the environment. Previously, I was teaching workshops several times a week all over East Anglia and beyond, performing live speed-art demonstrations and marathons, endlessly packing, unpacking and then re-packing luggage, running to catch buses and trains. My diary was shockingly busy, and I only ever saw my partner Jason at weekends, when I crashed exhausted for a few hours at his flat. I felt a flood of relief when all my events were cancelled overnight and I could spend some time at home and in the garden, even creating art for myself for a change.

As soon as it became clear that in-person gatherings were on hold for a while, there was suddenly a demand for online and remote activities to replace traditional creative workshops, but the challenge was to consider what art materials the average person has at home. On a Friday in late March 2020, I spoke on the telephone with Marie, who at that time coordinated the programme of creative workshops for our local arts for wellbeing charity, Inside Out Community. She was phoning me because they urgently needed an online creative activity for the following week. Marie and I discussed the issue of art materials, or the lack thereof, in most of the service users’ homes. “Maybe there’s something everyone has at home that we could use…”, Marie mused. “Leave it with me”, I replied.

That evening, I started painting with tea and coffee. My studio smelled amazing. The warm, earthy tones of coffee pigment resembled sepia ink, while a range of black, fruit and herbal teas could create delicate watercolour effects. Knowing that not everyone would have a paint brush, I experimented with mark-making tools that people might have at home, including old store cards, combs, feathers, fingers, and so on. I experimented painting on the backs of cereal packets and old envelopes, because not everyone has access to cartridge paper. It was the first of a series of creative workshop activities that other tutors and I presented as short film tutorials over the lockdown period. The response was extremely enthusiastic and kept the creative spirit strong at Inside Out Community. Since the film tutorials were on YouTube, anyone, anywhere in the world could watch them, hence the potential audience reach was infinitely greater.

Although art had by then been classed as ‘non-essential’, it swiftly demonstrated its power to bring connection and healing. One creative activity that particularly resonated with people during the lockdown period was one that I called ‘Creative Snail-Mail’: the art of letter-writing with creative adornment. By contrast with e-mail or instant messaging, snail-mail travels slowly. In this sense alone, it can bring healing, reminding us of the value of a slower pace of living. Snail-mail brightens the recipient’s day when it reaches them, but also brings immense joy to the sender. Sometimes I find a pictorial postage stamp that reminds me of someone, so of course I stick it on an envelope and post it to them, adding adornments around the stamp that extend the miniature artwork on the stamp itself. Sometimes I play with the lettering of the recipient’s name and address, adding freestyle flourishes (while always making sure the text remains legible). The simplest doodles and creative touches on an envelope can bring a smile. A stamped wax seal on the back evokes bygone days.  Friends often tell me they’ve framed my envelope and put it on the wall, and I’ve even heard posties say that I’ve made their day when they deliver my post. I dedicated my ‘Creative Snail-Mail‘ film to the memory of my dear friend and penpal Saima, who tragically lost her life to COVID in 2020.

Most of all, snail-mail brings healing through connection. This was uniquely relevant during lockdown but is no less important today. As Phyllis Theroux said, ‘To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.’

Your commitment to sustainability is a central aspect of your artistic practice, reflected not only in the themes you explore, but also the materials you use and your packaging and shipping methods. What advice can you offer to artists who aim to cultivate a more environmentally sustainable practice?

Whether you are a freelance creative or a hobbyist, my best advice is to start small, aim for gradual improvement - not perfection - and be persistent. Every tiny step counts, e.g. switching to local suppliers to reduce your carbon footprint. It’s important to weigh up options to see which has the least impact on the environment and not to beat ourselves up if we make ‘mistakes’. Just resolve to keep on improving. Sometimes we are so focussed on one single aspect that we completely forget to take another into consideration, which may be hidden but have far greater impact on the environment. For example, it’s great to go paperless and digital, but if this means switching to cloud storage, does this cancel out the benefits? The carbon footprints of things like computing, cloud storage, and AI tend to be hidden behind a facade, but just because there’s no exhaust pipe extending from the back of your laptop doesn’t mean it has no carbon footprint. If you’ve never investigated the hidden carbon footprint of AI, you may be in for a shock when you learn about its environmental costs, which are hard to pinpoint.

Gradually evaluate every aspect of your practice, ask yourself how you can improve, how you can reduce your impact on the environment, and - perhaps most importantly of all - how you can inspire others to strive to do likewise. Challenge yourself to recycle existing materials and use what you already have to create art rather than always buying new materials. But don’t stop there. Consider every aspect of your practice, your business, and your lifestyle to see if you can reduce your impact there, too. Simple, creative solutions are always the best. If we take sustainability seriously, then it is not simply something we do or aspire to, but an ethos that affects every decision we make.

Prioritise efforts and activities that inspire you. For me, tree-planting is a practical, (literally) down to earth activity that is also magical and sacred, aligning perfectly with my art practice and imagery. Most of all, I enjoy physically planting native trees myself and watching them grow, though whenever I can, I also fund tree-planting and associated activities of habitat restoration elsewhere in the world, knowing that people and wildlife will benefit - indeed, this is particularly useful if you have nowhere to plant trees at home. Anyone can fund tree-planting around the world via organisations such as Ecosia and Ecologi. Personally, I manage very well without a lot of things that many people consider essentials, such as make-up and air travel, but tree-planting feels like a genuine investment in the future of humankind.

Importantly, remind yourself often that every tiny step counts. Many of us - especially sensitive souls like us creatives - are prone to suffering with eco-anxiety these days. I’ve had more sleepless nights than I care to remember worrying about the state of our planet and how hopeless everything seems in the face of endless bad news: wildfires, deforestation, oil slicks, extinction,  global warming, microplastics pollution, and so on. It’s easy to get sucked into feelings of despair and hence give up on our own efforts because they seem utterly insignificant by comparison. In this context, a positive mindset that clings defiantly to hope is a candle glowing in dark times, but a single candle can light a million more and not be diminished. Keep up your own efforts, no matter how small they seem. Share those small good news stories on your socials, shout about them, and you never know how many others will take heart and encouragement from them.

Thanks to organisations such as Wild in Art, public sculpture trails of painted animal statues are becoming extremely popular in towns and cities everywhere. I’ve painted (and occasionally otherwise transformed or created) sixty-something sculptures since 2016 and therefore have collaborated with nearly as many charities.

Admittedly, the basic statues tend to be made of fibreglass and resin, which are arguably not sustainable, but I believe the positives outweigh the negatives, and, after all, the statues have to be durable outdoors for many years as they are purchased at auction after the trail, with the proceeds going to support the charitable cause. The trails benefit a wide range of organisations and individuals, including local businesses who sponsor designs for the duration of the trail, and the local economy via a vast influx of visitors and tourists who frequently travel hundreds or thousands of miles to visit the trail. The trails benefit local communities and families who are encouraged to get outside and walk the trail, visiting all the sculptures, unlocking rewards via apps, and perhaps discovering parts of their own towns or cities they’ve never been to before. The trails benefit the charitable cause they support, not only raising funds but also awareness, and often improving the organisation’s public perception, as for example in the case of a hospice, popularly seen as a place you go to die - by contrast, the hospices I’ve worked with are now seen as life-affirming institutions that inject colour, creativity and fun into town centres. People miss the trails when they come to an end and eagerly anticipate the next one. Last but not least, the trails benefit freelance artists with income and exposure.

Themes of sustainability are popular with sponsors and rightly so. A few years ago, only big businesses were expected to be working towards sustainability goals, reducing and offsetting their carbon footprint. These days, every business, however small, is expected to do its part and be accountable. As a business owner myself (albeit a one-person business as a freelance artist), I take this extremely seriously.

In terms of leveraging one's artistic talents to contribute to worthy causes, as you rightly anticipate, there are challenges and rewards - flip sides of the same coin. One practical challenge specifically in the context of these trails is the sheer size and weight of the statues, which need at least two people to carry them and are often too wide to fit through a standard door, and hence weighing up the personal and environmental costs of either having them shipped to your own studio or travelling to the location and painting them in situ. I do a bit of both. Working in a painting space alongside other artists can be particularly enjoyable, with the added bonus of potentially meeting your sponsor and some of the charity representatives. At the time of writing (Spring 2025), I’ve recently returned from a week in Birmingham where I painted a Bull statue for a public art trail. I spent a wonderful week working flat out in an enormous warehouse. Luckily, that gave me ample space to set up a ‘tent’ of dust sheets about my Bull in order to be able to use an energetic splattering technique without risk of paint landing on anyone else’s statue. While I was there, I collected up all my cardboard, paper, cans and plastic to take home to recycle, especially in the context of recent waste collection strikes in Birmingham. Doing so enabled me to use the circular tops of yoghurt pots to print parts of my design, for example. I often find that being focussed on sustainability makes me more creative and inventive.

Designing for the trails has become increasingly competitive as there are more and more artists submitting designs. Naturally, this is a challenge, but also a reward, because it forces me to innovate, experiment and stretch my creative vision much further than I otherwise would. Competition should bring out the best in creatives, not the worst. Thinking about how to visually convey relevant contemporary themes that interest sponsors - most notably sustainability - is a fascinating challenge in its own right, which has pushed me to explore these themes and imagery, and I am endlessly grateful for that.

Art and artists play various roles in the fabric of contemporary society. How do you see artistic practices advancing sustainability and social consciousness?

Artistic practices offer hope through creative solutions. They have a uniquely empowering role in helping both the practitioners (i.e. the artists or creatives) and their audience to advance sustainability and social consciousness, by presenting an alternative perspective. We hear so much about the climate crisis in the news these days, we tend to feel a sense of hopelessness and overwhelm. We scroll on. But art has the power to inspire. It can present things in a fresh way that reminds us that no effort is too small to make a difference. Art can paint a vision of a better future that resonates so deeply with people that it takes root in their hearts and begins to grow. Art can shake people out of their complacency in ways that science or statistics struggle to do. Art can present things in surprising, unexpected or humorous ways, as for example a sculpture that is created out of relatable, familiar, sustainable materials, or a surreal-scape that hints at the gravity of the climate crisis through playful juxtapositions, encouraging people to stop, think, and interact imaginatively.

Imagination is the key. Artists are like the prophets of old. We tend to live on the periphery of society, mixing with all classes, offering commentary, vision, hope and inspiration. Many of us have yet to perceive our own superpower in this regard.

What message or call to action would you like to share with our readers?

Female empowerment is a generally overlooked and extremely practical and achievable key to solving our greatest environmental challenge. Women in many parts of the world still have little or no say in what happens to their bodies, how many children they have, what education they receive, if any. Promoting gender equality, empowering women and girls through education and giving them access to high-quality family planning and healthcare provision may not have obvious links to sustainability, but improving quality of life and reducing infant mortality rates will stabilise population growth and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is an important factor why I personally choose not to have children. Even growing up here in the United Kingdom, I have sometimes felt denigrated and stigmatised as a result of choosing to be childless as a woman, but this is something I feel strongly about, so I have stood my ground. I personally want to send a big shout-out to every woman out there who chooses not to have children. If you choose to be childless, it arguably reduces your carbon footprint more than any other decision ever could.

Overall, I would urge everyone to adopt a positive mindset and then cling to it like our lives depend on it - which they do. We can all make a difference. Like the one candle that lights a million more. It’s easy to feel hopeless when we constantly see doom-laden headlines about the climate crisis, but it’s important not to focus on those. Learn from them, yes, but avoid dwelling on them as an image in our minds. Our mindset is the only thing in life that we genuinely have control over. Therefore, we have a choice: we can feel depressed, hopeless and full of despair, sinking into eco-anxiety, or we can cultivate hope and optimism against all the odds. Ultimately, it’s all a matter of mindset - mind over matter - ideally a collective mindset in which millions of human beings cling to a vision of a better future, inspiring all around them - especially younger generations - to do likewise, and collaborate for the sake of sustainability. As the saying goes, teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable for the child as it is for the caterpillar.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, spend time every day outdoors in nature, whatever the weather, whatever the season, reminding yourself of what it feels like to be truly alive and vibrant.

Learn more about the artist here.

All images courtesy of Loïs Cordelia.