This is the thing you need to know about Jessica Zoob: she is a portal through the looking-glass. When we look at her paintings – really look at them – we see mirrored there our hopes, fears, dreams and dreads. No wonder people often cry when they encounter her work. The emotions it engenders is related to our most innermost thoughts and feelings. It is not just that we see: it is that we are seen.
-Excerpt from This Moment by Helen Chislett
This Moment
I have created a body of work called This Moment and it is about the extraordinary pivotal time we find ourselves in.
This collection is about the precarious state of our planet, how passionate I am about it, how desperately I care for it, how fragile I understand it to be and how hopeful I am that with enough support and knowledge and people becoming less ignorant about what they are doing, by making good choices, by being willing to change and embrace the wild, we can actually protect and save our world and make it into the wonderful place it should be.
I hope to encourage people to stop and gaze, to be reminded of the beauty of nature and to be inspired to protect it.
It is both a hopeful collection and sad, and much more challenging, probably than in the past, and more complicated. It is not simply about beauty, or places to escape into any more. It is about deeply held, passionate beliefs of what really matters.
My wish for This Moment
This is an extraordinary time to make choices. We have all been given time to be still and as we emerge we are now given the space to make choices.
I do not believe that it was a coincidence, that at the very moment the planet is in huge crisis something unimagined has forced us to stop. I know this has caused enormous distress and upset but at the same time it has presented an opportunity to re evaluate the path we were on.
Now as the world turns we can choose. Do we look toward the light, set our hearts towards the light? Do we make choices to heal? Make choices to protect, nurture and save our beautiful world or do we continue blindly to just destroy, desecrate and through greed, blindness and ignorance to ruin something so magnificent.
I know what my choice is. I am so grateful to have found the clarity and really hope that through my work and my words I can help other people to understand how beautiful fragile and precious this life is. How connected we all are: every human soul, every creature, every plant, every insect, every seed,every living molecule in the earth, every drop of water and every planet in the solar system. Every thing is extraordinarily connected and once you know that, you don’t want to harm anything because by doing that you harm yourself, your loved ones, your community and your future.
My wish for this moment is that as we come through it we appreciate it, that we keep re finding each other moment ahead of us a moment of appreciation, love, gratitude and a re-centring, a re awakening. So, when we do move and take actions our actions come from love.