Anni Snyman and PC Janse van Rensburg

By definition Land Art uses the land as its medium. To this end, some Land Artists often enlist the landscape’s natural cycles; the resulting intervention is not an end in itself, rather it births a living sculpture which grows and changes over time.

Anni Snyman noticed a particular tree with a redolently anthropomorphic form in Plettenberg Bay. Out of a piece of driftwood found by PC Janse van Rensburg, she carved a head and together they tied it into a nook of the tree. The carving of the head and fashioning it into the tree was only part of the effort required for the sculpture to come to fruition. Only in the years to come would the various stages of Vergestalting come to life. As the head becomes embedded into the tree, the foreign piece of driftwood will no longer look strange, it will become an integral part of the tree. If the head is removed, it will appear as if some portion of the tree is missing. This living sculpture explores the process by which an alien object becomes a local one.

Unfortunately, the head disappeared a few weeks after the events of Site_Specific.