Vegetation 植物

Some of Zacharias’s first coloured pencil pieces were abstractions of the natural world, including flowers and other plants. Why coloured pencil instead of paint? After doing etchings in an unventilated shared studio in another city once a month, she wanted a healthier medium that could provide immediate results and remembered some abstract drawings made years ago in art school and how much fun she had drawing them. These drawings are to be joyful and a pleasure to see. What could express that better than flowers?

Ocean 海

Some of those early abstractions included a large, six-panel drawing called Celebration with fish-like shapes swimming across the panels. A later triptych was something Zacharias had a compulsion to create but was then never completely satisfied with. One of the three drawings had been a finished vegetation piece that had been reworked into a marine scene and it was later reworked a second time to become Flights of Fancy. Another piece became a book cover for a bilingual book of poetry.

Pollution 汚染

After moving to Kanto, critics declared that the florals were “too pretty” and Zacharias became determined to try something more conceptual. With allergies to pollution and the yellow dust that blows in from the Asian continent, she decided to explore the concept of pollution, something that personally affected her having lived and worked in the shadow of an industrial chemical plant in Kyushu.

Dust ダスト

After starting to think about pollution and its relationship to the artist, a workshop on traditional Japanese art materials gave Zacharias the idea of of creating paint with dust as its natural pigment. After a few consultations with experts, they remained skeptic but agreed that it was technically possible. At first, Zacharias used only the dust collected from her own residences but soon asked friends and acquaintances for the contents of their vacuum cleaner’s contents. That contents was filtered to obtain only the dust and dust-like particles, samples were labeled and set aside, and the remaining dust was then heated to kill any organic pests. This source of natural pigment is infinite and inexpensive.

Circles 丸

Dust is not only a source of pollution; dust in the air is why sunsets have such beautiful colours. After a forest fire or volcanic eruption, the air is filled with fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 or other sizes). That particulate matter aids in the refraction of light to create amazing sunsets thousands of miles from the source of that dust. After surgery immediately before the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), Zacharias lacked the physical strength to move wooden panels or to spend lots of time on any one project, so she opted for daily drawings of sunsets on black paper.