CLIMATE ART AWARD: PRIX COAL 2025

The climate art award, Prix COAL 2025, spotlights visionary artists who turn environmental crisis into cultural power, reimagining water not just as resource, but as ritual, memory, and myth.

This year’s edition of the Prix COAL, France’s leading award for ecological art, focuses on a powerful theme: freshwater. While floods and droughts grow more extreme, these artists help us see water not just as a resource, but as a sacred thread running through life itself.

Charlotte Gautier van Tour Wins for Bloom, le sang des glaciers

To begin with, Charlotte Gautier van Tour leads this year’s winners with Bloom, le sang des glaciers, a project that makes melting snow feel personal. Through vivid red blooms caused by microalgae, she shows how climate change stains even the purest landscapes.

In collaboration with scientists, she mixes sculpture, story, and science to bring attention to this fragile Alpine ecosystem. As a result, her work reminds us that snow is not silence—it’s a warning whispered in crimson.

Honorable Mentions: Stories in Dew, Puddles, and Dry Rivers

Pauline Rip, winner of the Prix COAL jury’s special mention, blends design and folklore in Elficologie: la récolte de la rosée du matin. Through handcrafted tools, poetic rituals, and strange histories, she gives new life to the simple act of collecting dew. Moreover, her work connects forgotten traditions with today’s ecological questions.

Mirja Busch, recipient of the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles/Paris mention, dives into puddles—literally. Her Institute of Puddleology archives puddles from around the world and examines them as urban ecological clues. In doing so, she turns overlooked street corners into climate maps.

Meanwhile, Férielle Doulain-Zouari offers a poetic response to drought with Ain el coton. Her clay-and-glass installation traces a once-flowing river in Tunisia, now dry. Significantly, this work is created with local artisans, serving both as a crossing and a call to remember the land’s past.

Student Prize: A Floating Tapestry of Life

Clara Niveau-Juteau, winner of the student climate art award, offers a living work of art with Fresque du Vivant. This floating textile, dyed with plants and embedded with native seeds, slowly dissolves in water to spark new growth. Not only does it tell a story—it becomes part of the landscape.

In collaboration with local scientists and conservationists, her piece becomes a poetic tool for regeneration. Furthermore, it encourages viewers to imagine art not as something we look at, but something that acts.

IRK’s Favorite: Julien Salaud’s Marecoeurdepinail Is a Heartbeat in the Wetlands

Among the nominated Prix COAL artists, IRK’s personal favorite is Julien Salaud with his project Marecoeurdepinail. Known for fusing myth, biology, and meticulous craft, Salaud delivers a luminous, almost devotional work that pulses with the quiet majesty of wetland life. While not a prize winner this year, his installation stands as a living reliquary. Part shrine, part science fiction, that invites viewers to tune into the heartbeat of the Pinail reserve.

Feature image: Julien Salaud Marecoeurdepinail ©julien Salaud

Sans Réserve: A Month of Immersion

Beginning December 12, 2025, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris will host Sans Réserve, a special month-long exhibition. In addition to installations, there will be live performances, workshops, and talks. The event invites visitors to reflect on freshwater through science, myth, and ritual.

Throughout the show, each artist’s voice adds to a broader conversation about water as memory, mystery, and necessity. Above all, the exhibition asks us to reimagine our relationship with what flows beneath, around, and within us.

Why the Climate Art Award 2025 Matters

The Climate art award 2025 proves that art can open minds—and hearts. Unlike policy reports or protest signs, these works speak in the language of feeling. By doing so, they connect us more deeply to what we risk losing. The Prix COAL 2025 brings art and urgency together in the age of the freshwater crisis.

In a time of rising temperatures and shrinking rivers, these artists show us that imagination is a tool for survival. Indeed, before we can protect the water, we must learn to feel for it.