Art meets nature in land art

Residents admired thought-provoking land artworks at Johannesburg Botanical Garden, Emmarentia, on 10 May. This as Site_Specific hosted its annual land art event, the Jozi Land Art 2015.

Radio personality Jenny Crwys-Williams opened the event along with the event’s coordinator Chris Reinders. The latter explained that the event’s objective was to “get people to think about nature and art… and get people back into nature.”

Crwys-Williams said that the setting reminded her of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, because it was so beautiful, and the “intersection between art and the natural is amazing.” Among the most popular pieces was a collaborative work by Lucas Thobejane, Yannis Generalis and Sybrand Wiechers. Thobejane had sculpted a Place of Worship, consisting of a room with seats around a seven-layer pillar, all from the wood of a fallen willow tree.

Generalis and Wiechers used the leftover wood carvings to place outstreched ‘wings’ on a tree overlooking the place of worship, so that it depicted an angel, not unlike the Winged Victory of Samothrace displayed in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Kiveshan Thumbiram constructed two life-size ducks made of bread, water and flour. “It is a play on making ducks out of what they eat,” he said.

Lew Rosenberg created a woman with a curtain of fabric hung between trees for her face, and branches, rocks and fruit on the ground for her torso. His piece, We are all made of stars, aims to confront xenophobia. Some of the artworks will be collected by their artists in the following days, while some will emain indefinitely.