Requiem to Gaia - Waterless

This work is based on an image built using radar and published by ESA, the European Space Agency, showing how the Earth should be like without water and seen from space above the Atlantic Ocean. Just as skin is the largest organ in our bodies, water is the most important element on Earth, for life and for us. Certainly the human being would disappear if the water disappeared from the Earth and would be seriously damaged if the oceans were extremely polluted. So I decided to approach the absence of water to create a dramatic visual effect. Since we imagine the Earth as a perfect sphere, I filled the areas where the water would be with ground glass so that the work had a circular shape. The continent's areas were filled with small electronic debris and other elements discarded by contemporary society in order to represent human occupation and pollution. The areas where we see the bottom of the oceans without water, were painted in a dramatic representation of the Middle Atlantic Ridge represented by a scar that separates the Americas from Africa and Europe. A detail of the painting shows the same region of the planet painted as it is seen with the oceans. Thus, as in most of the works in this series, I created a kind of "closed circle", in which a detail of the painting is the entire painting and the entire painting is a detail of itself. Gaia, Mother Earth, without water loses her perfection and conventional beauty.

 Walter Miranda – Summer/2015