More than 180 students from 64 sixth-form colleges across England contributed work to Planet Future, a national online exhibition addressing climate, sustainability and conflict.
Launched in June 2022 by the Sixth Form Colleges Association, the exhibition presented work by artists aged 16 to 19.
Fear, responsibility and possible change
The selected works did not approach the future through a single emotional register. Some focused on damage and loss, while others imagined practical or hopeful alternatives.
Arin Awojobi’s Nobody Wins a War addressed the human consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The work centred on loneliness, displacement and the children left to continue living as familiar structures collapse around them.
Trinity Fairman’s Finding a Balance considered the relationship between humanity and nature. Angelika Specht’s three-layer screen print Wrapped examined plastic pollution and was printed on recyclable material to connect subject and method.
Ruby Currie’s Hope for the Future deliberately shifted away from images of catastrophe. Her work considered what people could change rather than concentrating only on what might happen if they failed to act.
Art education as public expression
The exhibition gave young artists a national platform while demonstrating the role of art within sixth-form education. Environmental questions were not treated as subjects belonging only to science or politics, but as experiences shaped by emotion, imagination and personal responsibility.
The online format allowed work from colleges across England to appear in one shared space without requiring a physical national venue.
Planet Future recorded how a generation approaching adulthood understood the crises surrounding it. The works combined anxiety with agency, showing young people not merely receiving predictions about the future but constructing visual arguments about what it could become.