Berry Fade

Berry-fade, originally uploaded by escher1.

My mind had been distracted from land art for quite a while so I had failed to notice the rowan berries that had suddenly sprouted on the trees. Once I had noticed I could see that they were everywhere and had a large variation in colour.

I pickeds some in Birk Bank car park and we walked along to the quarry to make something. None of the rock slabs seemed flat enough and I knew I would struggle to make anything unless the surface was perfectly flat. And I was right!

The gritstone surface undulated quite a lot and the little berries just kept rolling around. Each berry was not uniform in colour, so to get the fade affect I needed to position each one esactly one way up. How very difficult was this to do?! Extremely!

Over and over again they rolled messing up the design, so I eventually had to balance each row against the next one. One wrong touch in the wrong place would result in them all falling out of line and having to start again. Very frustrating!

After a very long time I was nearly there, only for the square to look a bit misshapen from some angles. So I spent another painful half an hour trying to reconstruct the corners. I couldn't quite get it as square as I wanted but I just couldn't take it anymore, so left it as it is. NOt bad but not totally how I wanted it to look, but I am not sure whether I could ever make it like that!