As Above 1 is a work that refuses to let the sky remain a backdrop. Where most ecological art trains its attention downward, into soil and root systems and tide lines, this piece turns that gaze on its head. The atmosphere becomes the subject, and through it, the artist finds a way to speak about the living world below with unusual precision and feeling.
What As Above 1 is actually about
The title draws on the ancient principle of correspondence: as above, so below. It's a phrase that once described celestial mechanics, but here it describes something more grounded. The sky carries the signatures of what happens on earth. Particulate matter from deforestation, moisture patterns shaped by wetland loss, light refracted through air changed by burning. As Above 1 makes these invisible records legible, asking the viewer to read the canopy of air the way a scientist reads a sediment core.
The GreenWay Art Prize has long supported artists who work at this scale of thinking. It's not enough to paint a damaged reef or photograph a bleached forest. The prize seeks work that builds a new kind of attention, one that connects the micro and the macro. As Above 1 does exactly that. It positions the sky not as scenery but as evidence.
The visual language of the piece
The work operates through layering. Atmospheric photography, processed and re-examined, sits alongside data rendered into image. Neither element dominates. The result is a surface that rewards extended looking: the longer a viewer stays, the more structure emerges from what first read as pure light and tone.
This approach shares something with the idea of another alphabet, the notion that nature encodes meaning and artists can learn to read it. As Above 1 treats light and atmosphere as precisely that kind of alphabet. Each tonal shift corresponds to a real condition in the world below.
Color here is not decorative. The palette in As Above 1 was built from recorded atmospheric data: specific wavelengths, specific hours, specific geographic positions. That discipline shows. Nothing in the image is arbitrary, and that restraint is part of what gives the work its authority.
Ecological art that works from distance
One challenge for ecological artists is proximity. So much of the genre depends on closeness: the close-up of a damaged organism, the intimate portrait of a threatened habitat. As Above 1 proposes a different relationship to scale. Distance, it argues, is not detachment. Sometimes you have to step back far enough to see the shape of a problem.
Artists in the GreenWay Art Prize community have found various ways into this territory. Works like those celebrating coastal guardians such as alien mangroves approach ecological crisis from below the waterline and at the forest edge. As Above 1 completes something of a vertical axis, adding the dimension of sky and altitude to the conversation the prize has been building.
The GreenWay Art Prize was established to foster exactly this kind of range: works that approach ecological questions from angles that shift the viewer's assumptions. As Above 1 qualifies on every count.
Why this work stays with you
Most viewers report the same experience: the piece is calm, and the calm is unsettling. There's no visible catastrophe in the frame. No dead coral, no felled tree. Just sky. But once you understand what the sky is recording, the image stops being peaceful and starts being urgent. That gap between surface and meaning is where As Above 1 does its real work.
It's a reminder that ecological damage is everywhere, including directly overhead, and that art's job is sometimes to make the familiar strange enough that people actually see it. As Above 1 does this without a single dramatic gesture. That's hard to do. It takes real control to build tension from light.