While thinking of our relationship with the natural world, I wanted to embody something less tangible than animals or plants–but as something we oftentimes take for granted and can’t live without: air! Air, in its invisibility, surrounds and sustains every living thing in this world, yet we rarely notice it until it’s either gone or polluted. That invisibility feels symbolic of how easily we overlook what’s essential, how often we ignore the unseen forces that hold together our world–and our emotions. Dressing as “air” became my way of representing both that invisibility and necessity.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the idea of air takes on a spiritual and moral weight. After all of her suffering and transformation into a human, the little mermaid becomes an “aerial spirit,” a daughter of air, freed from the physical confinement of the sea and her body. She can no longer belong to the water, nor can she belong to the human world–so she transitions into something of the between, a breath, a presence that moves unseen. That transformation struck me as deeply environmental. Air exists between worlds: the sea meets it, the earth breathes it, and it circulates through everything. To me, dressing as “air” was a way of acknowledging that liminal space, that delicate threshold and boundary where transformation and connection all coexist.

In the ending of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the mermaid’s transformation into an air spirit is bittersweet. She loses her voice, her body, but gains a kind of transcendence–a second life of observation and care, unseen yet intimately involved with the world. That mirrors our own relationship to nature today because of the way we impact what we can’t see. It also reminds me of the moral undertone Andersen ties to the air spirits–they earn their souls by performing good deeds, by aiding humankind. I thought about that while putting together my costume–how air, in its quiet omnipresence, is always giving, sustaining, even when we don’t notice.

So, in choosing to dress as “air,” I wanted to embody that unseen grace of Andersen’s aerial spirit–the aftermath of longing, the cost of transformation, and the quiet power of something that exists everywhere but is rarely seen. It’s all about presence without visibility, giving without reward, and how even what seems weightless can carry the heaviest of meanings.