Valmiera students approached sustainability as an art form

Do you know what land art is?

Students from the Multimedia Design stream of the Valmiera Secondary School of Design and Art (Latvia) took part in the GreenFest’21 Art Festival in the Gauja National Park. Their contribution consisted of an art project called “Main Meadow”, which was one of the 12 creations conceived in the framework of the festival.

For this purpose, the students, just like other artists, had to make use of natural materials that they found in the environment. They chose to utilize autumn leaves and hay cut in the summer as raw materials.

Earth art is ephemeral, thus adding a new layer of value to it

This is a good time to introduce our readers to the concept of land art, also known as earth art. This is an approach to artistic creation using materials found in one’s immediate surroundings and which harmoniously match said surroundings.

That means that such art is as sustainable and non-invasive as it gets since it doesn’t add any artificially produced or foreign objects. It also means that it is very fragile and prone not to last in many of the cases where organic materials are involved.

The aim of the competition was to create environmental art objects, through which the GreenFest'21 Art Festival raises the issue of extinction of various plant and animal species. The latter being a direct result of environmentally unfriendly management with long-term consequences for ecology, environment, nature and man.

The Art Festival runs until 31 October, but visitors should note that the basic idea of ​​earth art is to create from nature and allow it to be taken back, so many works will not survive long because each art object has a different life cycle. Sometimes land art can take a few seconds, which artists capture in photographs and or by drones to see from above what has been created.