A Fighting Chance of Being Seen

The leader of the family art event walked fast, her feet flicking in a bee-line towards my face. “How are we doing?” she asked nervously. By ‘we’ she meant me. I was on all fours, chopping up a pretty Pachysandra border by the architecture school. It was good-strange to be back at my old stomping grounds, the A-school, as we once called it. That’s where a group of eight families with children—including mine—gathered last weekend for an environmental art “jam” sponsored by UVa’s Fralin Museum of Art. “Great, it’s going great!” I said, looking up. With her hands on her hips, the leader made a Superwoman silhouette against the blue autumn sky. She peered at the scissors I was wielding and saw her job security flash across the blades. “I don’t know how the faculty will feel about this,” she sighed.

Question: when people learn about Burning Man, do they want to go out and torch things afterwards? Because spending an afternoon at the museum learning about environmental artists Patrick Dougherty and Andy Goldsworthy sure made me want to slice some nature.

The event leader was a force of nature herself, and not only because she could’ve stomped my head with her foot. In just an hour’s time, she’d expertly introduced our mixed-age group to environmental art, given a tour of Dougherty’s recent installation, screened a film about Goldsworthy, and plied us with delicious snacks. The least I could do was offer some reassurance. “Oh, this groundcover grows back super-fast, trust me,” I smiled. Snip, snip. This was no botanical BS. For years Pachysandra’s blobby creep has bullied my front walk. The leader gave me a worried look, then returned to the courtyard where all the other parents and children were sculpting.

Dougherty’s installation stood just down the hill from us, towering like a twisted-branch, half-scale Stonehenge. The North Carolina artist’s work never disappoints, but his piece at UVa surpasses all others I’ve seen. Members of our party were alternately giddy and contemplative as they flowed into reed rooms, stepped through apertures, and measured their wingspans between columns. Children fell to their knees and pulled at trunks, asking how deep into the ground they reached in order to hold the structure up. Parents lay on their backs and looked at disks of sky framed in the roof’s round openings.

The museum had provided an array of natural materials for the families to make their own environmental art, including stones, flowers, branches, and gourds. This abundance explains why I was the only tool cutting up specimen beds beside A-school faculty offices. The other reason was this: the courtyard at the architecture school is cavernous—too big to share the limelight with any creations the families would make that day. From across the brick terrace, the adults and children were dwarfed, their artwork invisible. To cope with this type of scale problem—and the fragile, solitary, and ephemeral nature of his work—Goldsworthy’s art is mostly known to the world through photographs. His Google byline reads “Photographer” ahead of environmental artist, or sculptor. Fittingly, a museum photographer circulated in the courtyard at the art jam, capturing the day’s production.

English artist Andy Goldsworthy working in nature

What drew me to kneel in the Pachysandra was its manageable, sixty-square foot size, and its location against an open-flight of stairs. There, a sprig of art had a fighting chance of being seen. A student descending the steps might look over the railing to see that something had changed since the day before. A cafe employee might notice an orange streak bisecting the plants that line her walk to work.

“Come and see!” my kids called, debuting the work they’d made with their fellow jammers. In the courtyard, piles of pine needles tumbled from retaining walls like Niagra Falls. Rocks formed spirals festooned with berries and gourds. When my daughter asked me to explain my way-over-there project, she listened and then responded, “Cool.” She even found scissors and helped. Others wandered over and watched, perplexed. As with my architecture practice, I continued, betting that people would come around as the idea took shape. The snip, snip eventually yielded a narrow trough that ran the length of the green bed. When I began lining the trough, kid volunteers shuttled handfuls of leaves from a nearby maple and followed my specs that they all face the same direction on the ground. Butts stuck in the air. The event leader looked on and nodded.

Hysteria rides on the shoulder of every creative person.    –Patrick Dougherty

Although allowance is a big word in the creative world, resistance is its silent partner. Resisting self-doubt and shouldering the risk of ruffling feathers is as much of an acquired skill as balancing reeds and twisting branches. Whatever our vocation, we face the possibility of a disappointed client, a disapproving banker, or a booing audience. These outcomes, as it turns out, are the weird reward for winning the fight to be seen.

I make a lot of crap, but I have to be out there, trying things…when I get beneath the surface of things, these are not moments of mystery, they are moments of extraordinary clarity.       –Andy Goldsworthy

Postscript: An exhibit of Dougherty’s work is on display at UVa’s Fralin Museum of Art through December 22, 2013. His site-specific installation, completed in October, will be in place for approximately two years.

Thanks to my husband Joe and my friends for photographing the art jam for me when my phone battery died.