I found a photo of polar bears that illustrated my point quite well. Several friends have been to the Arctic in recent years to see polar bears - one saw lots, and another only one in the distance. I am a supporter of Greenpeace, and was involved in mailing people about the Greenpeace activists who were imprisoned in Russia as they were protesting against drilling there.
All of these combined to make this a subject that I feel strongly about, preserving areas of natural ecosystems that are at risk of being permanently destroyed. We know that polar bears are finding the shorter hunting season a problem, and many starve as a result.
As I constructed my piece, using all hand dyed or painted fabrics, it reminded me of the marble floor in the church Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome. This has a meridian line across the floor and up one wall, which the sun strikes and shows which astrological sign is current in the calendar. That thought led me to investigate the constellations of ursa major and ursa minor, a nice play on the mother and baby bears. I have never been able to 'see' the creatures and people in the stars. These are relatively close to the shapes in some star guides.
One collection of zodiac signs from Santa Maria degli Angeli.
