Confronting Climate Crisis: Before It’s Too Late

Title: Before It’s Too Late
Artist: Laura Bernardeschi Nelson
Medium: Mixed media (acrylics, oil pastels, spray paint, natural dried flower and fern)
Collection: Climate Change

Description:
Before It’s Too Late is a visceral mixed-media work that confronts the accelerating crisis of climate destruction. Using acrylics, oil pastels, and spray paint, Laura Bernardeschi Nelson constructs a haunting urban-industrial landscape where a family appears to suffocate beneath layers of smoke, fumes, and environmental collapse. The figures are deliberately rendered with softened, blurred features—symbolising the erasure of humanity within systems that prioritise fossil fuels over life.

Real dried flora—a fragile flower and a preserved fern—are embedded directly into the work. This gesture introduces a physical presence of nature that resists its own annihilation. Their brittleness becomes a quiet but powerful counter-argument to the surrounding imagery of oil, gas, and coal: a reminder that even in decay, nature carries an ancient resilience and a plea to be protected.

Scarlet text—HELP, STOP, and BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE—cuts through the composition like emergency sirens. The words are at once a warning, a protest, and a lament.

Philosophical Interpretation:
At its core, this artwork asks a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human in a world we are actively unmaking? The family’s struggle for breath becomes a universal metaphor for the human condition in the Anthropocene—an age where progress threatens the very air required for existence. The dried flower and fern operate as symbols of time itself: they are remnants of life, suspended between endurance and extinction, demanding viewers to confront their own position in the cycle of creation and destruction.

The piece proposes that nature is not a passive victim but a force with deep memory—one that outlives empires, industries, and the illusions of human control. Yet it also reminds us that our window to act is finite. The philosophical tension lies in this contradiction: the planet will persist, but will we?

A compelling addition to contemporary ecological art, Before It’s Too Late is both a warning and a witness, urging collective responsibility before disappearance becomes our shared fate.