Now in its fifth year, the Maison/0 This Earth Award works with the CSM Art Programme to celebrate the power of artistic practice to advocate for nature.
This year, nearly 50 students submitted work through open call submissions across Fine Art, Art and Science and Contemporary Photography, Practices and Philosophies.
Congratulations to this year's winners.
Anastasia Belinskaya - MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies.
Yufei Chen - BA Fine Art.
Tess Pirrie - BA Fine Art.
Mariia Korneeva - MA Art & Science.
Elena Garcia Sirvent, BA Fine Art .
Alexandre Capelli, LVMH Group Environment Deputy DirectorCarole Collet, Director Maison/0, Central Saint MartinsAlex Schady, Art Programme Director, Central Saint MartinsZarina Muhammad, Art Critic
MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies, Slowest Wave|@abelinskaya|@csm_macp
This work emerges from Anastasia's interest in extractivism and the material politics of natural resources. Motivated by research into polar ice drilling, it reflects on how fresh glacier water and natural cold are becoming some of the most precious resources of the near future and a ground zero for climate change.
Inspired by my visit to the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, the piece draws on real scientific and environmental processes. It explores themes of memory, fluidity, and fragility, highlighting the slow yet irreversible release of frozen archives of Earth’s climate data and the loss of fragments of glacier time: trapped air, fresh water, and microorganisms dating back up to 800,000 years.
BA Fine Art, Anthropocene |@sunspringersl6|fine_art_csm
This work is motivated by the rapid urbanisation that took place in China. Growing up in a rural village on the edge of Beijing, my childhood was filled with memories of playing in a nearby river, chasing butterflies, and finding bugs in forests. All these sites and memories were recently replaced by construction sites and bulldozers. Witnessing rivers, mountains, and animals disappearing. I try to reuse abandoned ‘landscape stone’, a special stone in China often used as decoration in gardens, representing general nature in small vistas. These stones represent the fast process of human overexploitation of nature and destruction on wildlife without considering the consequences.
All the stones used in this work were gathered from discarded zones near stone-processing factories in Beijing. These stones were abandoned due to imperfect shapes or overproduction, making them hard to sell. Because of their large size and high cost for transportation, factories often disposed them in rural areas outside the factory, leaving them unused. Through modifying these abandoned nature representations with highly artificial methods, my action critiques humanity’s unsustainable consumption of natural resources and our ongoing disregard for the environment and biodiversity. The act of drilling on stone—demonstrating the most common way we extract from the earth—evokes broader questions about what is lost, not only in terms of materials and wildlife but also our emotional and spiritual connection with the natural world. This work and its title, Anthropocene, reflect my rejection of the ‘Anthropocentric' mindset, which sees humans as higher than nature.
BA Fine Art, Go Back Home |@tesspirriepaints|@fine_art_csmThe idea of land being quarried and abandoned is something that happens all over the country and world to even more extreme degrees, as we reap the benefits in our daily lives of the materials that are taken. Go Back Home attempts to illustrate how these types of spaces can be so familiar as to go unnoticed. While we exist within an urban space, nearby countryside is used and industrialised for our benefit. Presenting it in such an underhand way of bright joyful colour tries to infiltrate our understanding and many peoples attitudes towards the climate crisis of something stark and unapproachable.
Go Back Home is a beaded hanging landscape, a potential door between spaces, a reminder of the places we come from. Intentionally bright, colourful, dreamy, reminding people of the joy of the land that’s always nearby. The image depicted in the work is of a disused sand quarry, that had been abandoned and neglected for decades. The uneven mounds in the foreground are from the quarried earth being terraformed then left to grow over. Tire tracks that have then scarred the earth, opening up leading the viewer on. The work is an attempt to lead people into a space, remind them of the importance of where they might be from. It is a standing piece sculpture that benefits from direct natural light that changes throughout the day.
MA Art & Science,I am an island, an ocean and a crying woman |@korneeva_transdisciplinary|@artsciencecsm
In this installation, I work through the best way to demonstrate a figurative map of the Sakhalin Island ecosystem. In my written word, which is incorporated in the final piece, I speak directly to the Island, giving it personhood. I discuss how current Russian government actions and inactions affect Sakhalin: The over-extraction of resources, mountains and fields of non-recycled garbage, dead wildlife. This is yet my most personal and vulnerable work.
BA Fine Art, Phantom |elegarciasirv|@fine_art_csm
Phantom is an interactive sound installation that explores the ghostly presence of sound. Utilizing a custom Foley board, built from unrefined industrial components such as metal, wood, tension wires, and metallic balls. Through touch-based activation gestures, these materials are triggered and manipulate pre-programmed sounds, which are then amplified and transformed.
Subtle movements become catalysts for an evolving sonic landscape, generating an unpredictable sound of percussive, resonant, and frictional sounds evoking the ephemeral nature of the disruption in our everyday acoustic landscape.