Reflection

A Texas skyline is usually breathtaking anywhere you go. My childhood was peppered by glances across the coast. Corpus Christi. Port Aransas. Other blurs of prickly sand. I would take in the daunting vastness. Every single person who has gone to these beaches looks out and ignores; ignores how the perfect line of the horizon is interrupted by silhouettes of oil rigs. This piece is meant to display the silent toxification of coral life. Coral bleaching and ocean acidification has increased drastically in the past decade and is reflected throughout this piece. Ocean temperatures have risen, and even the slightest increase—mere tenths of a decimal—can cause marine life to die. As shown in this piece, colorful romantic corals and endangered fish species dot the bottom, thriving, living... but carbon emissions have secured a creeping death as depicted by the bleaching of life the closer you get to the surface. So many people know of the dangerous state our manipulated climate has driven our ocean to, but they are not moved. Influenced by Inuit mythology, I have given the ocean a face and a body to represent Mother Ocean and to elucidate her suffering. When the public hears of marine life perishing, they cannot see its agony. They cannot see emotion. I hope to have changed that in this personification of mother ocean’s distress. She is choking, gasping, on the connotations of climate change. Maybe then, compassion surfaces, leading to a future where our coastal skyline is just that: a line.