Data Journalist Mona Chalabi’s Uplifting Art Prints for Earth Day
Three limited edition works, produced in collaboration with Absolut Art, celebrate beautiful facts from the natural world
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Absolut Art tapped artist Mona Chalabi—an acclaimed data journalist, writer and TV producer—to translate optimistic, unchanging data into a series of limited edition prints. Drawn from statistics that celebrate the quiet beauty of the natural world, Chalabi’s visualizations bring numbers to life. She harnesses the joy in data and soothes the soul.
“In the time it takes you to read this, a gentle sea wave has crested twice,” the work “Undulation” reads, referring to a statistic from the journal Coastal Engineering in 2009. Tides, Chalabi notes, “are one of the most reliable phenomena in the word.” For “Rotation,” Chalabi references a NASA statistic on Earth’s continuous movement and in “Aviation,” our favorite, she plays upon the fact that “each day about 140 lovebirds (agapornis fischeri) will learn how to fly.”
“It’s precisely because everything is changing so much day-to-day,” Chalabi explains to Absolut Art, “that I wanted to look for the constants. It’s not to make you happy exactly, but to provide some comfort as an antidote to the anxiety induced by the world all around us.”
Produced in Stockholm, each limited edition print (complete with a certificate of authenticity) is available exclusively through Absolut Art for $175. On Thursday 23 April at 4PM EST, Chalabi will join Shantell Martin and Baseera Khan for the We Are We Conversation Series x Absolut Art live broadcast on Crowdcast, during which three guests who ask a question will win a print from the collection.
Images courtesy of Absolut Art
