Art Highlights

The central figure portrays a woman as the face of climate justice—those most burdened by a warming planet yet leading its renewal and resilience. Her flowing hair is embroidered with the Warming Stripes, using temperature data from 1850 to 2024, illustrating how the world has warmed over time and the weight women carry in this global struggle.

The strands of her hair transform into the ocean, flora, and fauna, expressing the movement from ego to eco. The artwork celebrates women’s resilience and Mary Robinson’s role as a catalyst for change in a changing climate.

From her hand, a dandelion releases its seeds, inspired by Mary Robinson’s Project Dandelion, symbolising hope and collective action spreading across borders.

Two fish, mangrove roots, waves, and a cloud. These familiar elements bring together the history and living connections of the Indian Ocean, from moving continents to the oxygen that allows a fish to breathe.

A Tale of Two Fishes. The pearl spot, or karimeen, in Kerala’s backwaters has cousins in Madagascar. The two fish in this artwork bring these relatives together, across the ocean that separates their shores. Their family resemblance takes us back into the geological and evolutionary history of the Indian Ocean. India and Madagascar were once together, before separating about 90 million years ago.

Mangrove roots provide shelter, feeding areas and places for reproduction. The tree reaches from the land into the water, where its roots become part of the habitat of fish and other organisms. The plants, shell and smaller creatures belong to this shared system. Coastal backwaters are integral to the Indian Ocean and its relationship with the lands around it.

The ocean and atmosphere interact. These interactions carries on to the land. Look at the blue wavy clouds and the blue curly waves. They both carry water, and they both are in motion. Water moves through the sea and sky, connecting them through evaporation, clouds and rainfall.

The bubbles. Fish extract dissolved oxygen through their gills. Oxygen enters the water from the atmosphere and through photosynthesis by aquatic plants and algae. Winds and waves help it mix into the water. Temperature and salinity affect how much oxygen the water can hold. Changes in the atmosphere can therefore reach a fish living among mangrove roots.

The International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE). The Kolls presented this artwork at an IIOE-2 meeting in Mauritius. It was the International Indian Ocean Expedition during 1959–65 that provided evidence for seafloor spreading and plate tectonics, and how India moved away from Africa. The expedition’s history connects with the story behind the painting, of moving continents, fish-cousins and an ocean whose life depends on exchanges between land, water and air.

Between synthetic, parallel lines
drawn across artificially constructed
maps, the clouds begin to form.
Climbing upwards like giant anvils of
cotton candy, a trick of the scattering
light projecting apparitions across the skies.

Oscillating between imagined landforms,
these vessels of rain and ice drift
tirelessly across tranquil seas and raging
oceans. Taking residence across
the continents, rising and falling
with the unseen breath of their creator.

Peripheral forces nip and pull at the
creases of this translucent drapery,
driving contrast that redefines the
transience of their approach. A warming
touch that contracts and expands
without caution or reproach.

Changing patterns reverberate across
the cloudscape, as thunder shakes the
firmament and drought stalks the land.
Reflected dreams shimmer across their
surface, the abstract shapes a portent
of what is yet to come.