It occurred to me this week that as a child I had an extremely vivid imagination. I found myself particularly drawn to stories, books and poems about fanciful landscapes. Endless hours spent playing alone in the yards, fields and woods of my youth, reading Eugene Field poems, The Secret Garden and other books with heroines living in whimsical, exotic worlds, playing Candyland, going to see The Nutcracker Suite, and watching films like The Wiz, Willow, The Neverending Story and Labyrinth fueled my daydreams.
Although I still enjoy a good fantasy book or film, feeling dwarfed by trees and watching the wind blow through wildflowers, my feet are more firmly rooted in reality than they once were. I find myself wondering how much those early years continue to inform my work. The idealization of nature is something that I find visually appealing however, I also recognize that conceptually it can lead to attitudes about the environment and its inhabitants that are very selfish and destructive.
When working on the second sand painting inspired by my Grandmother's backyard, I allowed myself the space to depict it with a pattern that was both whimsical and childlike, feeling it was appropriate for the subject. I also created this piece with the full awareness that the landscape it depicts is a place that exists now only in my imagination. Working in this way freed me from feeling the need to reference natural processes or the passage of time as I had originally intended. In making this work, I realized that referencing natural processes will require a completely different creative process which I plan to address this coming week. The passage of time I feel can be implied in several different ways. One of the methods I am working on is displaying the controlled pattern sand painting (shown here) with images of the new landscape created from its ruins (images to follow).
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