Nature or the four elements
Kiki Smith, Born, 2002
I think that if the earth wanted to take back the reigns, stop humans from soiling it, from disfiguring its beautiful surface it could erase us in one go.
It wouldn’t leave a chance of survival. The oceans would raise its angry waves into walls of water that could engulf us, the earth would crack, split and swallow us, the air would create gigantic tornadoes that would devastate anything that could stand in its way, volcanoes would wake up from their deep sleep, all at once and consume us under its lava.
Hidden behind our technology, us humans forgot that we are insignificant. We can indeed, protect, prevent, and try to anticipate the movements of nature, but if it were to erase us, we would be left completely powerless.
The technology we built make us feel and think that we are untouchable. We became ungrateful, selfish, power hungry machines,
Mother nature, source of everything, source of our very existence is not the protagonist of this story anymore, instead it became the backdrop of our lives.
And while we are heedlessly forgetting where we come from and are really made of, we are turning into digitalized, robotized being.
Nature as source of all things
Ana Mendieta, Flowers on Body, 1973
Ana Mendieta, Tree of Life, 1976
Ana Mendieta is probably the best example of an artist that is desperately trying to reconnect with those severed ties we used to have with nature.
For that, she uses the most basic and primal tool, her naked body. She stripped herself form the social construct of clothes and offers herself to nature the exact same way nature gave her life and enter that world, naked, bare skin.
She surrenders completely to natural elements, covering her body with mud, trying to be mud, or part of the trunk she is leaning on, she becomes the trunk. She covers her body with flowers, as if they were growing out of every pores of her body, she becomes flowers She also, floats on the surface of water, allowing its current to move her in any direction, she becomes water.
By putting her bodies in such state of surrender to nature, she tries to embody each element, to be nature in its purest form.
We, as viewers, only have a visual result of her experience, but Mendieta, living it fully with her body lives a real sensory experience, and putting oneself at the mercy of nature the way she does, must be a humbling experiences, making us realize that we are not at the top the chain, but just part of one of the earth’s being.
Ana Mendieta, Creek, 1974
Ana Mendieta, Soul silhouette on fire, 1975
Nature as a magical tool
In our collective consciousness, witches are individuals that always seen as being in tune with the rhythm of nature and that use its forces to manifest change. Tales often depicts witches living in forests, blending with the trees, communicating with animals.
But on top of everything, witches are known for their spells and potion making. They gather various objects usually from natural sources and attribute a specific power to each one of them.
This unbreakable bond that unites witches to nature is the very source of all their powers, they act as a sort of vector between humans and nature, canalizing its energy and transforming it into magic.
Kiki Smith’s instinctive approach to her artmaking makes me think of the preparation of magical potions. One of her exhibitions entitled I am wanderer presents various prints, sculptures and object of her wanders. As she goes on walks in the forest, she encounters many things that she picks up, either physically, or in the form of an idea.
Just like her work process, her strolls are organic, she allows it to take her places, making her come across accidental discoveries, guiding her in the next direction or project.
And just like a magical witch, Smith’s work is not only about nature, as an external observer, but also about the link between the female body and nature. In her work, nature becomes a common denominator to all her thematic; the body, death, and mythology. All three either coming from, going back to or being part of Nature.
Kiki Smith, Earth, 2012
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Kiki Smith, Variety flowers, 2014
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Nature as a metaphor for life and death
Bill Viola, The Messenger, 1996
“La mort n'est pas plus proche du vieillard que du nouveau-né ; la vie non plus”
Life and death is in Viola’s work one of its main thread, but often tied with natural elements, such as water and fire. In water, the body is usually presented still, surrendered, like floating in a state of deep sleep, or dead.
In The Messenger, Viola uses water as a tool. Water appears as the elements that puts the body in limbo, a water that could represent the amniotic liquid in which the fetus grows, or that state of floating being an indication of what we feel as we are living, floating in this strange reality, or even these deep water in which we disappear when transform into corpses.
Water becomes a metaphor for life; the initial shape, that is formless, makes our mind wander, is it ghost, is it a skeleton, or is it the shadow of a living, a fetus ? As the body slowly starts its ascension to the surface we start seeing it more clearly, we can now assert that it is a man. But is he dead or alive? Surely he is dead, who could be submerged for so long and still be breathing. But then this person rises to the surface, emerges from its deep deep sleep, and open his eyes as he takes a deep breath. So deep that it feels that the first breath ever inhaled, like a newborn would cry as soon as out of its mother’s womb.
Art making giving life to dead nature
Anselm Kiefer, Johannis Nacht, 2014
There is a certain beauty to dead and dried up plants; a dried bouquet of flower, left in its vase, in a designated space, will not move, alter, or change an inch, however as simple blow, as simple graze could be enough to destroy or disorganize this perfect arrangement.
It is in this fragility, balancing on a slim thread that dead nature finds all its beauty and poetry.
Anselm’s Kiefer was born on the same year the second world war ended. Grew up in the ruins of a city, everything was demolished and turned into gravel. The landscape surrounding him as he grew up was composed of destructed houses and building
“Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.”
In this idea of chaos and destruction Kiefer makes a poetic parallel with the order of the planets and the universe. In the documentary Remembering the future, while hitting on a huge painting with a machete, and literally breaking down pieces of his painting he says:
I painted a long time on this painting, and I did layers on layers on layers, and now I go back to the beginning […] it’s like in cosmos, it’s always construction, demolition, reconstruction, all the starts die and other ones are born... who started that to begging with? Who is responsible for that? We don’t know. We don’t why we are here, we don’t know where we go... it’s quite desperate don’t you think? Because we have an intellect to try to find out, but we cannot.
“when a star explodes, all its material goes in the cosmos, it’s there it’s not forgotten, and then one day it will recompose another star […]
Anselm Kiefer, The Cathedrals of France (detail), 2016
His dead landscapes, in all contradiction, are full of life. Known for his use of unconventional materials, Kiefer doesn’t just try to imitate nature with “artist’s materials” but instead uses nature itself in his pieces.
Muddy, soily, ashy, cracked, dried up, peeling, his enormous paintings by their scale, by the thickness of the impasto, coupled with unknown material completely suck the viewers into the works.
It only makes sense as he seen no waste in the order of the cosmos, he himself uses dead material coming form the decay of something that use to be, to transform into something that is going to become, and ultimately into beauty.
Anselm Kiefer, Aurora, 2015-17
Nature as a raw material
The Nazca lines, Peru,
from A.D. 1 to 700
It is nothing revolutionary to see nature itself being used to create art, and geoglyph might be the oldest living proof of that. The lines drawn on the ground are made by removing rocks and earth is order to create a shallow trench where a negative image would appear.
What are so specific with geoglyph is there imposing size (370 meters long) and that fact that they are literally carved into the earth. The scale of the drawings indicates us on the reason of their existence. Standing at ground levels the lines wouldn’t mean much and could even go unnoticed; it is only from the air, at a plunging angle that these lines end up making sense.
But the oldest Nazca line are thought to have been made around 500 BC, where no way of ever seeing them from above would’ve been possible.
From a complex irrigation system, to a gigantic astrological map, or even drawings designs for gods, no one has any certainties on why they were created.
But the idea that the earth, its soil, and rocks could be used in situ to create an artwork is a unique idea, and raises many question around the life of an artwork and its access.
Even when using natural elements into an artwork, the materials always end up being taken out of their “habitat” our of their context to be put in a civilized one.
And artist in his studios has a pile of sand, five, ten of twenty, but in artist in the desert has the immensity of dunes to create. The earth become a blank page itself, and we are forces to work with what nature has to
give us, in complete respect of its capacity and limitations.
Blythe Intaglios, from 900 BCE to 1200 CE
Robert Smithon’s Spiral Getty is a good example of such art; spirals are belived to represent movements through experiences in life. The Celts viewed this symbolas one of development, growth and expansion. On our path to the center of the spiral we find spiritual balance and find our balance and true connection to the universe and eternal forces of nature.
Rounded shapes are also shapes we encounter more often in nature in opposition to square and triangle, and that it why we assimilate spirals to nature in opposition to sharp edged shapes that relate to a more mechanical urban reality.
A spiral also represents something that turns in circle, that is cyclical, like the seasons, but also monthly lunar patterns and yearly solar and seasonal patterns, which in turn affect yearly patterns in plant growth and animal rearing.
It is not a surprise that the spiral is also a symbol of change as change is part of nature, nothing is static, nature is in constant motion, growing, blooming, withering, dying, over and over again. The Sun set every day to leave place for the moon to come. The moon itself influences the rise of the water etc etc.
Spiral Getty encompasses all of these connotations, and because it is made of natural elements in a natural context it is exposes to the weather and ultimately to alteration. Something that is an essential component of the work. When making art with nature we cannot be precious about, or imagine it is a static way. The art made is not ours, it is the Earth’s and for this reason, this spiral that represent change, embraces the change that comes in nature. It is made of nature, so it is made of change.
Robert Smithson, Spiral J
etty, 1970