Oak Frost Circle Film

Oak Frost Circle Film, originally uploaded by e s c h e r.

This is another film showing a sculpture being made. You have to listen to it with the sound up or else you won't get the full "I need to go to the toilet" effect because of the sound of running water.

Ok so it isn't the most exciting film you will ever see but I hope it gives you the sense of how fussy you have to be make it look right. And therein lies a common challenge with land art but also an area of great interest to me.

Often the environment, the temperature, the atmospheric conditions change. The materials can behave differently, the wind can blow things away, the sun moves so you have to be in the right place at the right time to illuminate something.

So the experience of making something is not simply limited to finding the materials and constructing it, you have to change tack as conditions vary but these changes are also incorporated into the work itself. As well as understanding the materials you need to understand the environment too.

There are many layers to nature that can be revealed through making land art.

I started to make this circle when it was very cold and very foggy. You can see just towards the end of the making section of the footage that the sun started to break through and was hitting the centre of the sculpture with the risk that the frost would start to melt. Knowing I still had a few hours of work left to complete it I cursed where I decided to make it. Nowadays I make mental notes of where the sun is at different times of the day. It's thoughts such as these that deepen my knowledge of nature and mean more aspects of her are incorporated into what I make.

Fortunately the sun went in again and I completed it with the frost unaffacted.