It’s a nice experience to observe nature and create a visual presentation out of it using typical studio media, such as pencils, paint, markers, and so on. But I’ve found that things can get even more interesting when you use actual elements from nature, in nature, to make that scene. With all of the components susceptible to weathering, exposed to wildlife, and at the mercy of people, outdoor installations have a temporary quality to them that makes the statements they proclaim all the more fragile and worth capturing while they last, before they all disappear.
One early spring, I took a trip with my 3-D design class to Papago Park, where I had the opportunity to make an art piece purely out of the objects I found. This process resulted in a work that
became one of my favorite pieces to accomplish, titled Desert Trickle.
For a presentation space for this installation, I chose an end of a large drainage pipe, about 2-3 feet in diameter, sticking out from the dirt in a low-lying and almost hidden area in the park. Then, in seemingly random places in the surrounding area, around bushes and entwined clusters of small bending trees, I spotted strange rocks of various shapes and sizes that appeared to have been splashed with splotches of pale blue paint at some time past, and were now covered with a fine coating of dust. This discovery of a visual paradox—the wet blueness of water and dry ruggedness of desert—was, to me, the perfect spectacle to use in my chosen space, so I hunted down and gathered as many blue-marked rocks as I could find and arranged them inside and outside the drainage pipe to create an impression of outflow, from the largest rocks to the smallest, from a few that stand out into the many that spread everywhere.
I enjoyed the opportunity to create Desert Trickle with nature as its theme, and using only natural elements. I think this was an appropriate setting to make the narrative visual.
Write a comment