Alexan­der John­son

Press Pass Cor­re­spon­dent

'Mag­nif­i­cent­ly tal­ent­ed' – this is how Annabel­la Thorne is de­scribed by her col­leagues. The bud­ding de­sign­er has mas­tered the abil­i­ty to string to­geth­er her abil­i­ty to cre­ate works of art, to her ac­tivism against en­vi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. Her tal­ents are di­verse, from cos­tume de­sign to paint­ings; nat­ur­al ma­te­ri­als are of­ten de­light­ful­ly pre­sent­ed in her works of art, mak­ing her an ex­em­plar to young peo­ple. She notes that art, al­though aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing, can be a medi­um to present sen­si­tive is­sues and be a ve­hi­cle to cre­ative­ly ed­u­cate per­sons about so­lu­tions. So from where does Thorne's in­spi­ra­tion stem? "From my love of Trinidad and To­ba­go and its na­ture," she said. It is this pa­tri­ot­ic af­fec­tion that pro­pelled the young­ster in­to be­ing se­lect­ed as an En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty's Youth Am­bas­sador (EMA YA). She proud­ly val­ues all the op­por­tu­ni­ties giv­en to her through the EMA YA. Two pieces of Thorne's orig­i­nal art­work are be­ing fea­tured in EMA's an­nu­al cal­en­dar and all of her en­vi­ron­men­tal cre­ations are be­ing show­cased at sev­er­al En­vi­ron­men­tal Fo­rums.

'OMG - Ori­ent My Gen­er­a­tion' a one of a kind youth en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cert, re­cent­ly host­ed by the EMA YA, was Thorne's last project. By head­ing a team of vi­brant, young peo­ple, she had tak­en on the chal­lenge of chief de­sign­er, con­struct­ing a mag­nif­i­cent spec­trum of colour­ful cos­tumes for every char­ac­ter in the con­cert. The per­for­mances en­tailed a lot of folk­lore hence many lo­cal myth­i­cal crea­tures were staged at the event. In an in­ter­view, the de­sign­er spoke pas­sion­ate­ly about Moth­er Na­ture's cos­tume. She said, "This piece in par­tic­u­lar was in­ten­tion­al­ly giv­en de­signs to pow­er­ful­ly and per­sua­sive­ly im­pact the au­di­ence in­to be­com­ing more en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly sen­si­tive." See­ing each cos­tume through an artis­tic eye, Thorne em­pha­sis­es that the en­vi­ron­ment goes hand in hand with our every­day liv­ing and it is this con­cept which is sewn in­to her works of art, es­pe­cial­ly those that were com­plet­ed for the con­cert. In her hope to mo­ti­vate oth­ers, the charm­ing Thorne added, "Al­ways keep prac­tic­ing, be in­spired by, and make your own artis­tic twist of na­ture's work. More youths ought to be en­cour­aged in­to us­ing their tal­ents to ad­vo­cate for pos­i­tive change, such as be­ing en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly." Search 'EMA Youth Am­bas­sadors' on Face­book for more in­for­ma­tion.