Imagine (@imagine876) visited Nelson all the way from Nepal to create "Smooth Sky" for the festival in 2022. Imagine's art practice meshes Sanskrit lettering with graffiti aesthetics. 

"The piece is an ode to blue skies! The sky in Nelson really inspired me. When I first arrived, I talked to the festival organizers and several people who’ve lived here all their lives, and they were all telling me how lucky I was during my visit because the sky wasn’t smoky. Since I got here, the sky has been a perfect blue the whole time and I couldn’t imagine this beautiful place any other way. 

What it says on the wall is “may the skies forever stay blue”, over and over again. It’s sort of like a wish, that with climate change and rapidly changing weather everywhere, the hope is that we have blue sky days like these over and over again; that things stay this way. I used a lot of shades of blue in it; the majority of the shades are sky blues, so if you take a photo of the wall, even at different times of day, some part of the wall is always matching the sky."