#prayforamazonia is a series of images, created by my children and I during lockdown in the UK. We revisited my archive of images of Amazonian indigenous people and landscape, and together transformed the images with gold, blood, earth, leaves - an attempt to touch on the grief felt for our planet and finding hope in the process. Brazil has been affected by the Covid pandemic in devastating ways and is the country with the second highest death rate in the world. The Amazon has been hit like no other area.

During the lockdown I saw myself having to become a teacher for my three children. While following schools' lessons, I watched from a safe UK home, the news president Bolsonaro’s irresponsible behaviour in relation to the pandemic and his government’s lack of response to containing the virus nationally, and deliberate attack to the Amazon and its people. I realised that my kids needed to learn of that reality. More than times tables, I wanted them to know that the Amazon and its people are in great danger. It moved me to print some of the images in my archive and, together, transform them. We used gold, fire and blood plus Amazonian earth and leaves brought home from my last trip. In the process we discussed what are the threats and challenges facing the region. I hope to have sensitively educated them to this imminent tragedy, while trying to articulate some of my own emotions felt in relation to the situation. They now know that the native Amazonian people have protected the forest for millennia. That their sacred land holds gold and other riches that the greedy West seeks to extract. That the Brazilian president’s rhetoric in favour of developing the Amazon validate crimes and invasions. Now they know about ecocide and ethnocide. That clandestine gold miners cut through the forest bringing disease, displacing the earth and polluting rivers. They know that fires are started before the soya and cattle comes. They know there is blood involved. While working with them in this way I could personally touch on the grief felt for the fact that whole tribes can cease to exist yet show my children the beauty of the moments I shared with such peoples and landscape. Perhaps we can inspire other young people to ask questions, to learn to love the habitat and the people that humanity cannot afford to loose.