Abby Weiss

Abby Weiss is a South African artist currently living in Victoria, Canada. She uses primarily painting and drawing mediums to create work that discusses the consequences and grief of climate change. As a creative child growing up in the wild places of South Africa, the intersection between art and nature was fundamental to her youth. Drawing shapes in the algae of river rocks and sketching animals with found charcoal, her connection to nature was cultivated early and is still reflected in her practice. Her work carries an urgency to express both the beauty of our earth and the fear of losing it. Abby Weiss holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (honours) in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria.

I am making art about climate change in an attempt to hold open a wound long enough that people have to look at it. My practice is driven by a need to sit with that grief rather than to resolve it, creating work that mourns what is being lost before we lose it completely. I am interested in what it feels like to acknowledge complicity and to recognize that beauty and devastation now exist in the same frame. The work I create explores themes of extinction and ecological collapse alongside memory, identity and the yearning for childlike innocence. Investigating these themes in tandem allows me to discuss climate change through a personal lens and to explore the emotional space where these areas overlap. I typically create representational work through painting and drawing mediums, utilizing unexpected elements to discuss the increasingly strange and unstable world we are living in. Using pixelation as a mode of abstraction has become a metaphor for disappearance while also referencing technology and its contribution to environmental crises.