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This past week I was fortunate enough to attend one of Linda Weintraub’s (seen below) Art/Sci Eco-centric Art workshops.  This workshop focused on our more primitive past and the usage of our senses with respect to objects found in nature.  Specifically, the objects that Linda had on display were all found on her walks through the woods surrounding her home in New York.  Prior to entering the workshop exhibit, Linda expressed to us how she wanted us to focus more innately on our keen senses of touch and smell, without talking.



Her “Welcome to My Woods” exhibit had several different themes, including volume, mass and weight, scent, form and beauty, and touch (with one’s feet).  Each of the specific objects, or collections of objects, had specific instructions as a guide to how one may go about inspecting them in order to really grasp the natural state that these items came from.  The instructional guide for the branches and rhizomes can be seen to the right.



My favorite section was the one titled “Bare your soul, Bare your soles”, which focused on sensing the different textures along the ground of the woods with your feet.  There was bark (that while loud and crunchy, felt like a foot massage), grass, an array of leaves, and some very fine berries that felt almost like course sand at the beach.

The workshop offered quite the juxtaposition to what we have been focusing on within the lectures and readings the past few weeks.  While we have studied mathematics and robotics in art, this workshop was a display of nature in its true form.  While one could argue that science and mathematics are rooted in nature, I do not believe that Ms. Weintraub’s workshop had any correlation to math or science, nor did it intend to.  As I mentioned earlier, this exhibit was meant to be a return to our primitive state as human beings, when we used to be much closer to nature, and actually experience “unpaved roads” as Linda put it.  This primitive past is one in which artists did not consider the application of mathematics in art, but rather enjoyed the natural beauty of forests and faunas.

I would recommend Ms. Weintraub’s workshop, as it certainly reminds us of where we came from and brought me closer to nature.  Living in urban Los Angeles, it is easy to follow along with our current lectures and see the application of math and robotics within today’s art.  However, it takes some time to reconsider nature and its true beauty, and this workshop helped remind me of that.



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