
Do you know what Environmental Sculpture is? I didn't - until my wife told me
that we are going to make one. She explained to me that this is something you make
in the environment on purpose to enhance it visually or to express something in
visual form by use of Nature. She had a desire to express herself visually using
big trees as Environment. The purpose of her desire was assignment for her art
course.
Well, big trees means really big trees - so let's use THE BIG TREES. We found a group of them in our beloved town Warburton near Melbourne - the Giant Sequoias planted there in about 1920. Still babies, considering sequoias live about thousand of years. Beautiful trees in beautiful environment at Yarra river among the hills reminding us our homeland. During one of our visits she made some studies. She was quite happy - I was not. I was assigned the role of a photographer. And I knew there would be a problem with light. The big trees do not allow too much light through their canopy. Can you see on the picture left what is she doing? Good - you can't. There is no light. Here is another picture of the big trees - hard to make it better.
So we decided to use one of our suburban parks close to us - Norton Park. (At one stage she got an idea to alter something else from Environment, but than she abandoned it - to my relief.) Norton Park is a nice place with plenty of light (especially in the afternoon) and trees - though they are not the big trees, just cypress trees. We got there at about 4 p.m. and set for work immediately.
The theme of the assignment was "Embracing The Trees". Yes, she was embracing them - with the string running around the tree trunks - five trees each about 15 times around, then untangle it and do it again until you are happy with the result.
We finished our art work just before the sun set, last shots taken with minimum of light. Then we restored the environment back to the original state and at home we revised the photos and the video. Regardless of the opinion of other people who might think this was a crazy exercise, that afternoon will stay in our minds forever.
Some more pictures from the art work:
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