SUSTAINABLE ART.
During the late hues of summer, a main street in my hometown introduced an ongoing community garden project. Locally prominent for its bustling restaurant strip, O’Shanassy Street is inhabited with garden spaces that once offered very little more than dry shrubbery and rotten garbage. These public spaces weren’t beautiful, and they certainly weren’t efficient. Over the recent months, the street’s environment has taken a turn for the better. The gardening project, which I believe, was proposed by the owners of Sunbury’s local fruit market, has blossomed successfully. Once neglected garden beds are now growing lush with herbs and green vegetables, and these plants are tended to lovingly by townspeople. Some are even used as ingredients in the restaurant kitchens.
Sustainable art projects such as this are becoming more and more available for wide consumption. Notable is the Los Angeles-based Fallen Fruit, built of collaborative team of David Burns and Austin Young, whose various projects use fruit “as a filter to examine distinct places and histories, issues of representation and ownership, and address questions of public versus private space.” Part of the ‘Fallen Fruit Manifesto’ highlights certain principles of the organisation, one standing out in particular: the aim to “Open dialogue within neighbourhoods about public spaces”.
There appears to be a mystery in the power of nature in the neighbourhood. Every time I take a walk through town, somebody is nurturing chives, removing windblown litter or straightening the little dividing fence, and it’s quite pleasant to see these subtle little glimmers of love during the average day. In the past, vandalism had been a prominent deterrent regarding many community projects, but astoundingly these young gardens are growing well and unobstructed. The growth of a vegetable garden seems to mirror growth in community. Perhaps these shared practices are protected by a safe, familiar archetype, a sense of home. The very idea of ‘gardening’ triggers in my mind a picturesque scene where a quaint old couple are pottering around pot plants in straw hats and overalls, saying hello to the neighbourhood kids and sharing a pitcher of lemonade in the shade.
Another prominent contender in the world of sustainable art are eco-paintings. Andres Amador is an artist in the field of sustainability who uses the beach as his canvas. During the hour before the tide recedes, Amador skilfully creates sand drawings using a single stick. His method creates beauty completely independent of waste and materials and the art is washed away naturally by the tide, fleeting awe and entertainment of whomever may be lucky enough to pass by. While these sand drawings may not fill the stomach like fresh produce, they are definitely food for thought. Sustainable art continues to be practiced in endless varieties all over the world, and the wide response is hard work, celebration and comradeship. It goes to show that in the Age of the Screen, people still gather around nature – a little elbow grease can go a long way.
lipstickspoon 