Article published in the Bulletin municipal du Vésinet, “Le Vésinet Mag” number 78 of February-March 2022, entitled ‘Advocacy for living water’:
Nicole King, an eco-artist from Le Vésinet, has been invited to exhibit her ecological paintings at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress in Marseille in September 2021.
Nicole King’s family moved to Le Vésinet in 1968. Very attached to our town and its waterways which inspire her, she is very involved in the Vésin’Art association.
After having criss-crossed the planet as a water and pollution ecologist, she became involved in ecological art to defend biodiversity and denounce the impact of fossil fuels on the oceans.
She began to make a name for herself beyond the Paris region by being the only artist invited to exhibit 35 paintings at an exceptional event: the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille, inaugurated by the President of the Republic and visited by more than 30,000 people from 3 to 11 September 2021. During this congress, she gave two conferences where she was able to explain her career as an activist for 40 years but also to raise public awareness of the fact that a species disappears every 20 minutes without any measures being taken to meet the challenges.
Nicole King puts forward a new way of communicating about the environment through beauty, defended by painting. She relies on the interdisciplinarity between art and science to raise awareness. Her painting of a coral reef illustrates this desire to represent the complexity of this ecosystem while highlighting its beauty through bright colors.
The Marseille Manifesto was published at the end of the congress, presenting ecosystem-based solutions. One of its key measures called for is the protection of 30% of the oceans before 2030.
