Experimental Grass Wheel

Experimental Grass Wheel, originally uploaded by e s c h e r.

After spending some of the day in a meadow full of wild flowers and grasses yesterday I became fascinated by the rich variety of seed heads of the grasses, the hues ranging from purple to gold, brown, red and green and I knew then that the next thing I would make would be with grasses.

Land art is like mountaineering. No really it is. Just like it. Exactly the same, no difference whatsoever.

Climbing a mountain is all about the climbing itself and not the summit. Yet you need the summit to aim for to give you the experience of climbing towards it. But the destination is nothing without the journey.

Land art is just the same, without the sculpture that you want to make there is no journey of discovery on the way. This is what this sculpture is all about. I wanted to learn about grasses. Not their latin names and which ones are related to other ones. No, I wanted to feel them, look at them, compare them with each other, search for them, admire their colours and see how many varieties I could find. I wanted to try and understand what wild grasses grow around here and find out how beautiful they are.

So off I went searching and a-wandering and found dozens of different grasses. Certainly more than I expected and each one with quite different seed heads. I found how some had different forms, how some showed several different colours during different stages and how pretty they are. Mown grass just isn't the same.

The construction of this was very difficult, dropping it a couple of times didn't help and things fell off over and over. Finally I set it up for the shot the very second that the sun dropped behind a cloud only to return when it had gone behind a tree. it just wasn't going to happen today. I am not at all happy with this picture or the sculpture, the light wasn't right and having dropped it a few more times whilst setting up and losing several pieces, the symmetry being ruined and it generally looking quite tatty it just didn't work. The background isn't right, it isn't bold or precise enough and it is slightly annoying me looking at it. I missed the perfect light by one minute and to add insult to inury I stood in some dog ****! But other than that I quite like it!

I am posting this to record my thoughts on what happened but this was certainly an experiment and nowhere near the finished article. But I hope if I can bring to fruition the idea today's searching has brought me to then it will be well worth it. Let's hope.