Vanessa Wagneur
ESSENTIAL GREEN
2025 It's Not Easy Being Green
Vanessa Wagneur
Medium:
Sculptural installation
Displayed:
Across the UK and Brazil 7 Oct - 10 Nov
Artwork Description:
‘Being green’ in the context of sustainability and the environment, reflects the challenges of living ecologically in a world dominated by consumption and waste. In sustainable entrepreneurship, it expresses the difficulties of innovating with purpose, maintaining ethical coherence, and surviving in a market that doesn’t always reward impact-driven intentions. It can also serve as a critique of public policy and a provocation to question how governments or companies often pretend to be green.
For Wagneur, ‘being green’ represents a state of togetherness – united in diversity, varied in uniqueness. This was the inspiration for ESSENTIAL GREEN: a state of healing for the world. The image evokes hope, provocation, even spirituality: envisioning a green serum coursing through our bodies – a living, organic extract of nature that reminds us that we are nature. The photograph was taken at AZ Groeninge Hospital in Kortijk, a place that became deeply meaningful to the artist during treatment for breast cancer treatment in 2023, when the idea of this work first began to form.
Artist's Comment:
The concept of ‘healing for the world’, through the infusion of a vital serum, has been with me since 2021. After an emergency appendectomy, I spent a week in the hospital recovering from complications that nearly took my life. Yet I experienced profound peace. The soft light in the room brought me hope – a sense that my time had not yet come. I stared at the IV support with poetic awe, envisioning not just my healing, but the world’s.
Bio:
Vanessa Wagneur (b.1970, Campos dos Goitacazes, Brazil) is a Brazilian art-designer with a multidisciplinary background in branding, graphic design, sustainable fashion and visual arts. Inspired by Nietzsche’s “Three Metamorphoses of the Human Spirit,” she developed her “Theory of Circularity” – a life framework for creating and living with intention. A Rio native with a visionary soul, Vanessa displayed artistic sensibility from an early age. Her fascination with packaging and consumer behaviour led to the creation of her brand, ZÓIA, which pioneered a new mindset – challenging norms and redefining consumption through design as an act of awareness.
Her practice is rooted in the daily challenge of transformation. She is the mind behind concepts like CREATIVE Sustainability, the EMPACT Movement (entrepreneurship + empathy + positive impact + love), and the New P’s of Circular Marketing – all aimed at inspiring more conscious narratives. Vanessa curates fashion and design brands for the LivMundi Festival and promotes Brazilian artists through Contaí Trajetórias Internacionais. Now based in Belgium, she builds bridges between cultures through projects like TrampolineB and AGNI-CE. Her artistic values are simplicity, authenticity and poetic activism.
