This piece is on of several created collaboratively with artist Mary Kay Neumann for t The Flowers Are Burning: An art and social justice project that can be found here: https://www.theflowersareburning.com

"Floating on Denial: Rising Waters Series"
Collaborative Watercolor by Mary Kay Neumann and Helen Klebesadel
22x30
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"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”

– Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

“Within a single human existence things are disappearing from the earth, never to be seen again. Our sacred petroglyphs—those carvings in rock that were put there thousands of years ago—are now being put under water by the rising seas. We’ve seen this happen for a long time—this diminishing of our natural resources—through climate change and invasive species. The losses have been slow and multigenerational. We have narrowed our spiritual palettes and our physical palettes to take what we have. But the stories, the old stories that still contain a lot of those elements, hold on to the traditional. For example, our ceremonies and language still include the caribou, even though they don’t live here anymore. Similarly, we know the petroglyphs still exist, but now they’re underwater. The change is in how we acknowledge them”.

– John Bear Mitchell, Penobscot scholar and member of Penobscot Nation in Machiasport Maine (from Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush)