Zaria Forman’s hyper-realist seascapes and ice-capped worlds display a shifting scape brought on by climate change. An array of blues and crisp white pastels create scenes of vast isolation produced by Forman’s fingertips alone. There’s no human activity here, and yet Forman subtly imbues her images with an awareness that we’re destroying the majesty of these polar icecaps, while threatening others with its rising waters.
When looking at Forman’s art you feel the memories of first discovery – that moment when you started realising as a child the sheer scale of the earth. Her work, whether a floating island of ice, a stormy skyline, or waves crashing against the beach, creates not just a sense of danger, but also humbleness in seeing nature’s great expanse – you can almost feel the fresh air hitting your lungs. But there’s no coldness to Forman’s art, yes you can imagine the freezing atmosphere so well captured in her highly-texturized images; her understanding of light; the sheer magnitude of hues; the pastel-drawings producing an image that I had to repeatedly tell people was not a photo. But more than this, the images have a softness to them, even in the jagged ice – the work creating a calmness, and a moment of self-reflection.
Forman’s art often places the viewer’s focus to be at eye level within the artwork – thereby creating a sense of being immersed within it and capturing nature’s overwhelming force; the pictures not demanding but summoning respect. This perspective also provides a point of view for the people, animals and marine life that live there – seeing their environment as they do, and with it the effect of change. However, this difference in perspective is turned-about with Forman’s NASA images – having been contacted by them to help present the geometry of the poles – her art presents zoomed out scenes which pull us outside of our bodies and instead to feel immaterial and weightless as we look at the world below; Weddell Sea (2018).
Weddell Sea, 2018, Soft Pastel on Paper. Series: NASA. Zaria Forman
At a young age Zaria Forman travelled the world with her parents, the introduction forming a lifelong connection to it. The magnitude of nature inspiring her art work, and creating a resonance within it on a personal scale that carries through onto the viewer.
