Artist: Ronen Reuben

Age: 7

School Name: Sunrise Elementary, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

Lead-safety Message: We want to keep lead out of the environment to help protect the fish and the birds.

Description of Work: Paint on paper.

Artist: Leo Manttan

Age: 7, School in Australia

Lead-safety Message: Lead atoms form inside aging and dying stars through slow neutron capture, travel across space in gas clouds, and end up on Earth when accretion builds planets.

Description of Work: Crayon and coloured pencil drawing on paper, inspired by The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Lead-Safety Message from Google AI Assistant.

Artist: Grandma Lead

Lead-safety Message: Every day that you have solar panels for the sun to shine on, is a day you can feel good knowing that you’re causing less lead in the air from burning fossil fuels and you’re helping avert a climate crisis.

Description of Work: iPhone 13 panorama.

Artist: Grandma Lead

Lead-safety Message: There’s nothing quite like harvesting your own organic leafy greens, herbs and lemons, and making beans and greens soup plus lemon delicious for lunch while watching Landline on ABC TV on Sunday to see how real farmers adapt to climate change and take care of country while making a living from farming. So grateful!!

Description of Work: Selfies and photo collaged in Powerpoint and Paint.

Artist: Andreas Breitbarth

Lead-safety Message: Lead can often still be found in the paint of old buildings. We were washing our windows and noticed flakes of paint being blown inside into our room. We jokingly wondered if there was lead in the paint. We tested and lo and behold.

Description of Work: Photo collaged in Powerpoint and Paint.

Artist: Azalea Manttan

Age: 4, Pre-School in Australia

Lead-safety Message: A LEAD Group Kit is perfect for testing for lead in your garden soil, your backyard eggs, commercial chicken feed and even your chickens’ drinking water. Certainly, test any paint on your house, shed and the chicken coop to be sure it doesn’t contain detectable lead.

Description of Work: Paint on textured paper and texta drawing on paper and string cut and glued in place. Lead-Safety Message from The LEAD Group’s Lead Safe World Shop.

Artist: Azalea Manttan

Age: 4, Pre-School in Australia

Lead-safety Message: The LEAD Group works to create a Lead Safe World so that pre-schoolers of today will have a bright future.

Description of Work: Coloured pencil drawing on paper cut and glued in place. Lead-Safety Message from A Lead Safe World is in the Frame, at https://lead.org.au/lanv23n2/LANv23n2.pdf 

Artist: Grandma Lead

Lead-safety Message: Mists are fine. Bushfire smoke not so much. Wherever lead is in soil at the surface, such as in exposed ore bodies, trees absorb that lead so when bushfires happen, there will typically be excess lead in the air. Global warming increases bushfire frequency and severity so go solar for the sake of our birdlife and wildlife.

Description of Work: iPhone 13 photo. Lead-Safety Message from Lead isotopic compositions of ash sourced from Australian bushfires (Kristensen et al 2012).

Artist: Kevina Malhotra

Age: 12

School Name: Creative Einstein

Lead-safety Message: I hope my tiger will never eat animals that were shot with lead bullets, or be captured and put in a zoo with lead paint on old animal enclosures.

Description of Work: Coloured pencil drawing, collaged in Powerpoint and Paint.

Artist: Uwais Oka

Age: 8

School Name: Creative Einstein

Lead-safety Message: Lead toxicity is highly dangerous to betta fish, causing severe structural damage to their gills, blood chemistry alterations, and neurological failure. While bettas possess a specialized labyrinth organ allowing them to breathe atmospheric air, waterborne heavy metal exposure bypasses this defense, leading to systemic organ damage and death.

Description of Work: Coloured pencil drawing. Lead-Safety Message from Toxic effects of lead exposure on bioaccumulation, oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, and immune responses in fish: A review (Lee et al 2019).