EARTH AND SKY Oliver Roberts and LeighAnne Hunter meet land and cloud artists

Hewn from a hill or as ephemeral as evaporating water, land art is out in the open, writes Leigh-Anne Hunter

WHAT I remember most is the thicket of reeds, painted pink, and the way it made the baby kick (it was spring. I was pregnant). There was something subversive about it and the other natural art works that I came across that year on my walks. I pictured someone stealing in to the park to create them, confounding the authorities.

With a feather in her red hat, Anni Snyman could be the artsy Robin Hood I’d imagined. She’s one of the founders of Site_Specific, volunteers who have created land art around South Africa since 2011. In collaboration with the authorities, mind you, but my gut reaction wasn’t entirely off . . .

“Land art is deeply rebellious,” Snyman says in a gentle but authoritative voice. “Because you can’t sell it, it’s not that elitist thing that we find with most art.”

We meet at Johannesburg Botanical Garden in Emmarentia. Snyman looks at home astride a log — part of Limpopo artist Lucas Thobejane’s Kraal of Wisdom. He spent three weeks sculpting it from pieces of a fallen tree. Now it’s used by geese and playing kids.

“We like that,” says Chris Reinders, astride another log. Two years ago he started the annual Jozi Land Art event to expose the craft to more people, who can watch land artists create their pieces. “My favourite thing is the way people are surprised, overjoyed, by the discovery of an artwork in nature as they cycle or walk around here.”

Some pieces have been vandalised, but, says Reinders, this becomes part of the artwork.

The event has had growing interest. This year 30 artists participated, including Soweto artists Ubuhle Bobuntu, who astounded park users (and their dogs) with their giant life-like ants made of reeds. “We try get artists concerned about the environment in their approach,” Reinders says, “but a child can make something.”

Reinders himself is a bookseller who was inspired to create land art. He recalls his first time. “I dug deep holes with my hands. My face was in the soil. It was brilliant. I haven’t done that since I was a kid.”

We’re standing next to a lake now, our shoes in oozing mud. “We worked all along here in May. If you work outside long enough, you start seeing every tree and knowing the birds.

“What they called land art in the 1960s was Michael Heizer bulldozing half a mountain. I see it as more of a co-operation with nature.”

I overhear a kid asking his dad why people have painted the trees. I’m told the paint is non-toxic.

Of course land art pre-dates Heizer — things like the Nazca Lines, geoglyphs in Peru, are thousands of years old. Reinders’s view is that crop circles are created by guerrilla land artists. “Why would you travel 10 million light years to cut some patterns in the grass?”

Now it’s winter and in place of those exultant pink reeds are piles of dead leaves.

“There were works all around here,” says Reinders as he and I and Snyman walk through the park to see what remains remain. “Where that duck is standing I created a quartzite pyramid.” There’s something eulogistic in the way he talks about these bygone artworks.

He squints up at a tree. “Sybrand’s work is still there.” The artist attached the word “Crak!”, a land-art take on a 1963 Roy Lichtenstein, which he cut out of pine. Now it’s decaying. Says Reinders: “You can still kind of see the exclamation mark.”

“Hopefully land art’s ephemeral nature makes people think of time,” Snyman says. “We think we have to make work that lasts when we don’t even last. Why?” Some works last for just a few minutes, like the faces Snyman once painted in the dirt with water as people watched.

And here’s when I discover the reason behind Snyman’s hat. It’s for her to be visible when she leads teams in creating huge earth drawings. She’s completed two of these geoglyphs in the Karoo. “We put down a grid. We work precisely, and we get very stiff.” One, in the form of a snake eagle (Snyman conceptu-

alised both) took most of last year to build.

They were created in protest against fracking and to boost tourism — both geoglyphs are “thinking paths” made to walk. The second, in Loxton, is a combination of the endangered riverine rabbit and a jackal. “The rabbit is the symbol of birth and the jackal, death. So you walk the rabbit but when you look again, you’re walking the jackal.”

We walk. Reinders shows me a tree, saplings strung from twine all around it. “The artist was dealing with the meaninglessness of soldiers getting killed in wars,” he says. She died the following year in a car accident. “What's amazing to me is that it’s still here.”

I stand in that glade and think of my mother, who has cancer, and a woman I’ve never met, whose art became her memorial.

“I had this conversation with my son over the weekend,” Reinders says. “His cat died. Working in nature you become much more aware of life and death and rebirth.”

A reed artwork he created around a cypress represents his personal metamorphoses, “having gone through three divorces, leaving corporate publishing after many years”. Creating it, he says, was cathartic.

On the viewer, the effect is as profound. The space changes, becomes electric. You start speaking in reverential whispers. “Buy a painting and put it on the wall, eventually you’re going to stop seeing it. I believe inanimate objects have centres of energy. I think we’re much more connected to them than we’ve ever believed.”

It’s winter now. But in Thobejane’s kraal, where saplings are already taking over, Reinders sees a bud. “That’s the sign of spring.”

Those pink reeds that got me and my daughter, now a toddler, smiling a few seasons ago? Reinders says the artist created them for his autistic son. “He noticed that one of the things that drew him out of his shell was intense colour.”

Maybe we need a signpost to show us what’s there. “I get a sense most of us walk down paths and say well it’s pretty, but don’t really notice the tree or river. One year, Anni created this moon shape out of these jacaranda blossoms. It didn’t last very long, but while it was there, it was this vivid lilac.”

‘You walk the rabbit but when you look again, you’re walking the jackal’

Site_Specific’s four-week land art tour starts on September 8. Visit sitespecific.org.za