Touching the ephemeral moment

ChildArt, April-June, 2008 by Mira Reisberg

A heartfelt hug, a warm smile, the flash of a red Cardinal bird, these are ephemeral moments that touch us, sometimes briefly, sometimes profoundly, often not acknowledged as the treasures they are. We live in a time and world where many people feel compelled to work more and more at a rapid pace. By valuing things over process we lose the value in experience and the chance to catch an ephemeral moment. Therefore, we shortchange ourselves, communities, and world.

Fortunately, art provides a means to connect with the ephemeral on deeper practical, spiritual, and emotional levels. Many environmental artists' performances, installations, land art, and children's picture books help us to explore the ephemeral. Place-based educator David Sobel describes how important it is for children to learn to love their environment before being asked to heal it (1997), while Richard Luov documents many children's fear and alienation from the natural world (2005).

Artists, such as Andy Goldsworthy, can assist with these concerns. Goldsworthy is known for his amazing site-specific art, where he manipulates pieces of ice before sunrise, using only his bare hands and saliva to weave a form between the branches of a winter's tree just in time to see the sun shine through the ice in a quiet and a beautiful moment, showing hours of patient application, skill, and vision that one cannot help but be awe-inspired. This work exists for a short period of time before disappearing with time or weather. However, his work has been documented in a film called Andy Goldswortby--Rivers and Tides: Working with Time (Riedelsheimer, 2001), as well as in several coffee table books (Goldsworthy, 1990, 2004; Goldsworthy & Friedman, 2004).

By taking children out of the classroom and into their local environments, art teachers can help students engage in ephemeral art-making projects through which they learn about both their local natural world and other sources of enjoyment beyond shopping at the mall, watching television, or playing on the computer. By spending time outside in the wilderness (if available), parks, or even a school or teacher's garden, teachers can help students connect with nature, developing a relationship out of respect instead of obligation.

Inspired by Goldsworthy's work, students can gather materials to make outdoor installations in nature; draw with sticks in the earth; make pigments from grinding rocks to paint other rocks or to place inside holes in the ground to form small colored pools; or make nature mobiles to hang in trees for the birds to enjoy. Similar to Goldsworthy, the teacher can document students' work; however, the point of the art-making often is making the art, an ephemeral moment connecting with oneself, with others, and with what David Abram calls the "more-than-human world" (1996).

Mira Reisberg, Ph. D.