Ellie Giauque - 2021

Death of Beauty

With the current rate of global warming, our earth is experiencing extinction of various species, natural environment deterioration, and temperature changes in our atmosphere. Vulnerable landscapes are experiencing more wildfires, the ice caps are melting at alarming rates, and our oceans are warming and rising higher each day. Humans have been wreaking havoc on this earth since day one, and as time passes our footprint has gotten bigger and bigger. When I was younger I remember driving through the mountains in Utah with my family. A lot of the time we would pass forest areas that were wiped out by wildfires. It made me so sad to see so much death in a beautiful place. It wasn’t until my mother explained that some wildfires were actually good for the environment. She told me that wildfires were nature's version of “spring cleaning”, that when burnt down a forest can take important nutrients to rebuild and become healthier. As I got older I have never forgotten that learning experience at such a young age. However, our earth is no longer creating death to bring new beauty. Our earth is dying, and it is our fault. For this project, I used recycled materials that I found in an old abandoned building and in the Utah mountains. I wanted this piece to represent what wildfires used to be before it grew out of our control. There used to be beauty in death, but our hand in the overwhelming death on this planet has surpassed that now. We only get one earth, we need to take a wildfire to our destructive ways of impacting our planet.