Land Art

Think of the seasons, in springtime nature produces beautiful flowers which will soon fade to make way for the fruits of summer. Winter snow melts to fill rivers and streams.    Land artists make their work outside because they want it to be part of the changing cycles of nature.  Land art is not protected or preserved like artwork in a museum. Look at this piece by Andy Goldsworthy.  It must have taken a lot of time and patience to make, but it surely did not stay like this for very long.  These leaves only take on these beautiful colors for a short time. They will soon fade and disappear into the forest floor, as will this artwork.  In time, however, new leaves will appear and so will new a new pieces of art from Andy Goldsworthy. 

Let’s try making some land art of our own.  We can snap some pictures and then watch what happens in the coming days.  Will a bird fly away with a twig? Will bugs move in? Will the flowers wilt? Will everything collapse?  It’s okay for our art to decay, because just like nature, we will always make something new.

Materials
Look for something that you can find a lot of. It could be stones or sticks, leaves, flowers, seeds, pods, pinecones.

Process

You can let your materials inspire you. Notice in the video how Andy Goldsworthy takes a while just to look at his location and materials. Play around with them and see where it leads. If you get stuck here are a few ideas:

• Balance sticks against each other.

• Make a mandala. Start at the center and make a circular design that radiates outward.

• Stack stones.

• Break sticks into equal pieces and arrange them into a drawing or a design.

Percy and I were inspired by the Andy Goldsworthy video. We found some sticks that had been trimmed from a tree and balanced them in any way we could. When we were finished, we wove some flowers into our sculpture.