Flower of Life: creating ephemeral beauty in the desert

Courtesy Brighton Denevan.

Jim Denevan's Flower of Life art project that was created for the FORM 2024 music and art festival at Arcosanti in Arizona.

I spent last week in Arizona, working with a world-renowned land artist named Jim Denevan to create a giant ephemeral art piece for a music and art festival.

I almost always focus my writing on the Tehachapi Mountains and surrounding areas, but I thought readers might find this project interesting.

Jim has been creating art for 35 years, working primarily on sandy beaches, playas and desert landscapes around the world, on projects that are often epic in size and concept. I've worked with him numerous times over the years, including creating a three art pieces in Tehachapi at Weiser Family Farms on Highline Road.

Courtesy Brighton Denevan.

At night, hundreds of solar lights turned the mandala into a constellation of stars.

It was at Weiser Family Farms that we made a full scale homage to the Hummingbird and Spider geoglyphs found on the Nazca Plains in Peru. We also recreated the Atacama Giant, a geoglyph found in the Atacama Desert in Chile. These were made by applying kaolin clay to create the design in a couple of 2 and 1/2-acre farm plots that were planted to grain.

The recent project in Arizona was located in a farm field at a community called Arcosanti, which was established by architect Paolo Soleri in 1970 as an experiment in urban design. Arcosanti is located on a desert mesa at an elevation of 3,700 feet, about 40 miles from Prescott.

Jim's vast mandala design, called the Flower of Life, was made in conjunction with FORM 2024, a music and art festival which was held at Arcosanti on the occasion of its 10th year. The community of Arcosanti itself doesn't put on the festival, but they provide the venue and work in close cooperation with the producers of FORM. We have done two prior compositions at Arcosanti for the FORM festival in 2018 and 2019.

We first had to prepare the field, since it was left rough from a prior blue corn planting, then mark out the design. Then each of the elements had to be outlined and sprayed with water, since the soil was so dry, and then a light coating of the kaolin clay was applied. The clay is dissolved into water and essentially acts like liquid chalk, and it is used in organic agriculture as a harmless coating to apply to plants to discourage insects.

The design will simply vanish into the soil -- Jim's creations, like the sand painting mandalas made by Tibetan Buddhist monks, is ephemeral art that soon gets swept away by wind or time or tide.

The festival attendees camped in tents scattered around the periphery of the art circle surrounding the mandala. These randomly assembled tents, of different sizes, colors and shapes, became like multi-colored drops of paint on the artist's canvas.

While the mandala was interesting and compelling to see during the day, it was gorgeous at night, when it was lit up with hundreds of solar lights placed at the forward point of each of the design elements. These separately represented leaves, and then together united like petals to form a flower. After sundown the mandala became like a constellation of stars in the darkened desert.

Courtesy Jared Red.

I used a tractor and assorted implements to smooth the field before design work began.

Installing the Flower of Life project took a week of work by a small but dedicated crew of about a half a dozen people, assisted at times by some volunteers. We persevered through dust and dry, unseasonably hot Arizona weather, with daytime highs above 95 degrees, working long hours to complete the serene design in the Arizona desert.

The finished project was inspiring and worthy of all the time and talent that went into creating it. By day and by night, it was a memorable art piece, and I'm happy to have played a role in bringing it to life.

Keep enjoying the beauty of life in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Jon Hammond is a fourth generation Kern County resident who has photographed and written about the Tehachapi Mountains for 38 years. He lives on a farm his family started in 1921, and is a speaker of Nuwä, the Tehachapi Indian language. He can be reached at [email protected].