Making ephemeral art.

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Most beautiful things do not last: the scarlet leaves of an autumn maple, northern lights, the song of a thrush on a summer evening, or the taste of chocolate birthday cake. The world is full of flowers that bloom for just one day. Music is by nature fleeting--we cannot catch it, and can only enjoy it while it is there. So if a flower or a feast can be enjoyed for just a moment or an hour, why not enjoy visual art in the same way? Does art have to last forever? Can it be something that just lasts an hour or a day? Fine Art does not have to be made of paint and paper, clay or bronze. I love flowers and leaves, birdsong and beaches, so these are the things with which I work. I also love to make things. Creating something gives me a deep pleasure and I do not need to keep what I have made.

Because I love being on the beach, I once spent eight months making art almost every day on the seashores of Victoria, Vancouver and Saltspring Island in British Columbia, Canada. I called the project Gesture, as I wanted it to be about a moment of movement--a gesture where nothing is final. Sometimes I drew patterns in the sand with a special wooden rake, so the sand looked like a Japanese garden. The tide would come up and wash the designs away, or people would walk through them, but that was not a problem. I expected it. Either, I would make the image again or I would do something different. One of my favorite projects was to collect a basket of the most common empty seashells and then make shapes in the sand with them. I would lay the shells out in spirals, squares, circles, triangles, lines and wiggly waves. They looked beautiful placed like this. If I had time before the tide washed them away I would photograph it, but often I did not have time, and the images I made would only have been seen by forty or fifty people who were out walking the beach that day. But that was the point of doing these artworks on a public beach--I wanted people to see these ephemeral artworks outside in the real world, not just as photographs.

I have also made temporary artworks indoors. I made arrangements of stones, leaves, and shells on the walls or floors of art galleries. When the show was over, I collected everything up and took it back from where it came. I took the leaves back to the forest and the stones back to the beach. I enjoyed making the work and having other people seeing how the colors and shapes of stones look like when they are hanging on a wall, or what the brilliant whiteness of shell pieces look like on a velvety black carpet. Placing leaves on a wall, or making a mandala out of flower petals is exciting.

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Do you want to try making art this way?