SHEYNE TUFFERY

4 Dec

NEW ZEALAND, SAMOA

The Sustainable Development Goals which connect with my artworks are climate action and life on land.

Last year I made a body of work about the NASA - Gemini / Apollo Missions to the Moon of the late 1960’s highlighting how science and engineering had brought the world together when at a time it was falling apart though war and corruption. The photograph “Earthrise” taken on board Apollo 8 ’s pioneering mission of circumnavigating the moon, was the first time we had seen an image of our entire planet from space.

It was the image that helped launch the environmental movement of the late 1960’s. It also made people think of all of us together rather than separate nationalities, it gave people hope seeing the earth as this miraculous moving sphere of blue and green in the vast vacuum of space. It put us all into perspective.

The two digitally enhanced artworks combine local photography from Wellington’s own lunar coast of Waitaha Cove and graphic re-edited images from the NASA archives. These images are responses to the Apollo missions that made history by going to the moon but discovered the Earth instead.

My other mixed media work relates to the organisms that work for us to regulate and absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and produce oxygen for us to sustain life on earth, namely Trees and Plankton.

With these artworks I hope to inspire people to listen to the scientists about climate change and to be inspired by the miraculous connected sphere of planet Earth and its organisms that create and sustain life.