The branches of a tree drawing lines on the sky, the shape of a stone polished by the river, a spider’s web… beautiful visual inputs given by nature – which inspire me in my work.
But really, nature is a tough game. No mercy. Survival of the fittest!
Nature can manage well without human beings, but we cannot manage without nature. The latter is coming to the consciousness of more and more people, as we are about to create substantial and severe changes to our environment. Myself, I comment on this through my eco art project – The Scream from Nature – a contemporary interpretation of Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream, in which the iconic anxiety-ridden face is recreated outdoors in large formats.
Munch himself felt a scream through nature and painted The Scream. Now, more than 100 years later, we hear another “scream” from nature: extreme weather, melting glaciers, droughts, floods, and massive extinctions of animal and plant species are just some of the huge challenges the world faces today. People from all over the world are joining in, making their own Screams from Nature and sharing photos of them on www.facebook.com/thescreamfromnature and Instagram #thescreamfromnature. Check it out and see if you get inspired to make one yourself!
The artist’s connection with the surrounding environment saw a shift in the 1960s with the Land Art movement. Instead of depicting the landscape, artists engaged it. Site-specific sculptures, use of non-lasting materials, and escaping both the gallery room and the art market, marked a new direction. A direction that expanded and also includes the urban landscape. One well-known example of bringing nature to the city, is the planting of 7,000 trees by the German artist Joseph Beuys.
There are environmental art works, which create damage to the environment. For example, the celebrated sculpture Spiral Jetty (1969) by Robert Smithson created a permanent change upon the landscape and the lake. Speaking about water, it’s tempting to mention the opposite attitude coming to show in the work of Jason deCaires Taylor – Silent Evolution:
In the Cancun Marine Park, 400 underwater sculptures are about to form a new coral reef, in an area that is suffering from heavy human interventions and loss of coral reefs. As Taylor’s sculptures are slowly turning into coral reefs, the process of nature taking over is well documented through film and photos, see for yourself on: www.underwatersculpture.com.
I believe that conveying the beauty of nature, and being in nature, make us want to take care of it. This is valid in both large and small scale – from the sublime feeling faced with nature’s grandeur, to the wonder of the smallest details, if you take your time to look at it.
Which brings me back to what inspires me in nature: The lines of the branches towards the sky become lines on a canvas. The rounded, smooth shape of a stone calls for protection and is covered by wool. The spider’s web becomes a crocheted net around a tree.
This latter work, “Someday, I’ll go my own way”, I did in Slovakia for the outdoor exhibition “Landscape – revisited”. The tree is captured by a hemp net, and it needed to break out of the net in order to survive. The following spring, small green leaves started peeking out from the net. Now, it is even bearing fruit – it’s a wild plum tree. Nature finds its way.
