The Ephemeral Arts Festival, which encourages students to make projects from surrounding nature, took place on Sunday Oct. 28. The piece above was created by communication major senior Madeline Walker (Annie Renaud/staff photographer).
The Geneseo community gathered at Roemer Arboretum to create art out of natural materials for the fourth year of the Ephemeral Arts Festival on Sunday Oct. 28. The festival itself is a celebration of artistic expression through a sustainable, low-cost way. Photographs of the art will be displayed in Cricket’s Coffee Company on Thursday Nov. 1.
The festival took place on a fall morning during which participants gathered their materials. These materials ranged from freshly fallen maple leaves to a pile of bush honey suckle that had been pulled the day before during an invasive species removal.
Across the board, people were hesitant on where to start. The event, held in a relatively small clearing, first involved people talking and gathering to discuss their ideas on materials. Even those without a plan began to experiment in an open receptive space without rigid standards, similar to a class setting.
International relations major senior Sheila Barabino found the event intimate and relaxing.
“It’s a very zen environment,” Barabino said. “I love the collaborative feeling of it.”
Director of Sustainability Dan DeZarn had hoped that others would find this event inclusive and enjoyable.
“We wanted to give students the opportunity to participate in a creative endeavor that touches upon important aspects of sustainability,” DeZarn said. “It allows students to engage with the natural world to be able to form community with other like-minded people.”
In addition, DeZarn wanted the event to be a space of creative endeavor—one that has been lacking since the studio arts major was shut down.
Ephemeral arts can be defined as art that isn’t meant to last and usually include natural media. Globally, this idea manifests in Buddhist sand mandalas or rock arcs. During the late 1960s to 70s in the American art scene, ephemeral art became known as Earth arts through artists like Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy and even Yoko Ono.
Ephemeral arts are also something we commonly engage in, such as flower arranging for Valentine’s day, making sandcastles on the beach and building snowmen on a winter day. The focus was the act instead of the long-term recognition, emphasizing the process of interacting in that space along with juxtaposing the idea of commodity art.
When approached with the task, artists are only supplied with the earth around them.
Geography major junior Marty Benzinger embraced this aspect of the event by utilizing the wet, peeling bark from a pine tree and arranging it like a picture frame. His piece uses maple leaves of different gradients and pine ornamented on the outside to add an autumn smell.
As Geneseo moves towards more sustainable practices and simultaneously struggles to support the visual arts community on campus, the Ephemeral Arts Festival works to combine the two interests. Art doesn’t need to be justified or done for others to judge its worth through a grade. By returning to our most basic roots, we can see the beauty in smaller things and our right to self-express that on a greater scale.