Nils-Udo

Through out my blog I have discussed my interest in many different mediums and subject matter. This is an attempt to better understand these materials and subjects and acquire some concrete evidence of contemporary artists using similar repertoire in their works. I found a close connection to the work of Nils-Udo when thinking of my love for nature. Nils-Udo works much like that of artist such as Andy Goldsworthy, in that the works are made in nature with the materials at hand and are a typically site-specific. Nils-Udo has also employed the use of bamboo for several of his works and I was visually interested in his use of that material, although I am not currently using bamboo in my own work , I am interested in new ways of manipulating it as a material in the knowledge that it is likely I will return to that material.

Nils-Udo’s nature constructions, plantings, and arrangements of found elements evidence a need to seize the tactile environmental reality and to build a language out of it–but nature remains an equal player. Nils-Udo states that turning nature into art does not interest him. He says that what counts for him is that his actions, Utopia-like, fuse life and art into each other. He says that Art does not interest him. His reaction to events that shape his existence is what interests him. Immediately, this through me for a loop at first read, but Nils-Udo’s further explanation of this way of working is quite informative and a new approach to my ears. He says for example, “We do not call a beaver’s hut art or architecture, yet the logs are tooth-carved and the hut is a built construction.” “The divide between humanity and nature has become so clearly delineated a conception that nature has become a foil used to describe artificiality.” “The billboard or screen image of a leaf or a caterpillar, for instance, is now used to sell product.” In Nils-Udo’s work however, he reminds us of the fragile balance between human activity and nature.

I would like to end this post by citing a comment by Nils-Udo on his use of nature as material that reeds like poetry and I feel is very touching.

Sketching with flowers. Painting with clouds. Writing with water. Tracing the May wind, the path of falling leaf. Working for a thunderstorm. Awaiting a glacier. The May-green call of the cuckoo and the invisible trace of its flight. Space…

–N.–U.

Harper, Glenn, and Twylene Moyer. A Sculpture Reader: Contemporary Sculpture since 1980. Hamilton, NJ: ISC, 2006. Print.

Rocca, Alessandro. Natural Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2007. Print.