2015, Dirt is Good

 

Dirt is Good 

Process-based, time-based soil installation 

27 February – 1 March 2015 

THAT ART FAIR, Salt River, Cape Town, South Africa

 

While creating the installation on the first day of the Art Fair, I invited people to add drawings and thoughts onto paper, which I then integrated into the soil drawing. Over the next two days of the Fair the installation changed as people walked over and through it. Passers-by thus collaborated by giving their thoughts as well as changing the soil drawing with their feet.

 

So often we only value art that would last, and even outlast us. But how much more valuable is art and expression that captures our own fleeting nature and the impermanence of everything we experience. It is in the fleeing and present moment that we find real value – not in dwelling in the past, not in worrying about the future.

 

We have been conditioned to believe that dust and dirt is ‘bad’, and kids are now kept from playing the mud in the way that I used to play in the mud. We forget that the most nutritious and healthy foods come from the soil, and not a fridge, lab or factory.

 

I think it’s time to rethink and relook how we feel about the world around us.