South African artist Johan Steyn is on a mission — to highlight how human actions are affecting nature through life-like sculptures featuring wildlife characters and a young girl named Minki.
News24 reported on Steyn's work, explaining that Minki was the brainchild of his grandfather, who worked as a warden at Kruger National Park. As a child, Steyn would listen to his grandfather's imaginative tales of Minki and her interactions with the animals of the park.
"To me, the stories are a South African legend of a girl that was in my grandfather's imagination told to his kids to comfort them," he told the news site. "So, I manifested Minki in a different way through sculpting."
When it comes to his creative process, Steyn told News24: "I feel as if I'm not touching the ground and it becomes quite spiritual and magical. There are times you feel as if you are not the one sculpting, but that it is done through you and there are no words for it."
However stunning his works of art are, they're meant to be more than visually stimulating. The Minki collection, which includes animals like sea turtles, octopuses, and rhinos, incorporates stories that draw attention to human-driven species loss and the destruction of the environment. For instance, one sculpture shows Minki with a rhino calf that lost its mother.
"What I'm trying to create is a culture that shows consequences," Steyn told News24.
These consequences could be closer than we think, too. Scientists predict that we are on course to lose 40% of species by the end of the century because of a warming world and habitat loss, as reported in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
A world with fewer animals isn't just sad — biodiversity loss also affects us in many ways. For one, strong biodiversity is one of our strongest allies in the fight against rising global temperatures, according to the United Nations. Plus, it helps provide us with the tools we need to survive like water, food, and medicine, the organization adds.
To date, Steyn has produced 16 Minki sculptures.
"You will not find many true South African stories in art like the Minki story, and she is in fact more contemporary than people think," Steyn stated on the ArtAtAfrica website, which features the sculptures from this series. "She addresses everything from marine conservation, nature conservation, possibly global warming, to pollution of all sorts."
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