Earth Art in the Fan

This is over at the Warsaw Condos on Floyd. I have no idea what it is or why its there, but its pretty cool.

I saw this tree one day walking to class on Main St.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83.

These photos are both from Flickr, not sure of the name of the artist, but I liked the simplicity and the movement of the wheat (?) in the bottom picture. I find the top picture to be striking in how the twigs are framing the sunset perfectly.

I am a Creative Advertising major, and one of my ad campaigns was for Solo Cups. The campaign ended up being a series of pictures (this is one of them), where I put the cups in fences around Richmond in different shapes and messages. Looking at it now, I realize that it’s actually a form of earth art. I used pre-existing objects on the landscape (in this case, fences) and used it to make something.

What is Earth Art?

Obviously earth art is the combination of art and the earth, where the earth is used as the artistic medium. When I first started to think about earth art, I thought mainly of larger, man-made pieces, such as Stonehenge and crop circles. But when thinking about it further, I realized that it doesn’t have to touched by human hands to be considered art. As corny as it sounds, mother nature is an artist: take for instance snowflakes. They’re beautiful, and there are no two that are the same. I think that’s art.

On the other hand, earth art that isn’t natural can take all different forms. It can range from arranging stones, to carving trees, all the way to certain forms of architecture (i.e., log cabins). I personally believe that as long as long as the earth is used in some manner, its earth art.