Janet Cohen’s painting Oceania won the People’s Choice Award at the 2022 Climate Change Art Exhibition at Wauchope Art Gallery in New South Wales.
The work received the highest number of votes from more than 150 visitors during the three-day exhibition. Cohen spent approximately three months developing the painting as a visual argument for what she described as a new “ecology of mind.”
Climate change as a crisis of perception
Cohen’s idea began with the belief that human beings are inseparable from other forms of life. Environmental destruction, in this view, emerges partly from alienation from nature and from one another.
Oceania sought to communicate that interdependence through painting. Cohen described the act of making as a way of entering a quiet state in which divisions between the self and the natural world became less fixed.
Her environmental concern was informed by long involvement in conservation, including work connected with the Sea Acres Rainforest Centre in Port Macquarie.
An exhibition combining beauty and warning
Visitors responded both to the visual quality of the works and to their messages about ecological damage. The exhibition used art to make climate change emotionally immediate rather than presenting it only through scientific data or political debate.
The runner-up vote was shared by Cheyne Flanagan for Extinction is Forever and Sherri Smith for Phoenix. Their titles reflected the exhibition’s wider movement between loss, warning and possible renewal.
Cohen had also been living with terminal cancer since 2015 and campaigning for end-of-life choice. Although distinct from the environmental subject, this experience gave added weight to her attention to mortality, connection and the conditions under which life is valued.
Oceania stood out because it joined personal contemplation with a collective ecological concern, asking viewers to understand climate change not as a distant event but as a rupture within a shared living system.