April is Earth Month, and local artists are gearing up to celebrate the fourth annual Charlotte Earth Day. Charlotte Earth Day will feature two Earth Day-themed films and PBS’ Rootle Roadster Tour with its interactive learning stations and PBS KIDS-themed experiences.
Crista Cammaroto is a photographer and sculptor who created an interactive art installation for the event. She worked this past week on her Terra Forma sculpture, which was constructed entirely from local, earthly materials.
WFAE’s Zachary Turner dug in the clay with a local artist and her assistant, who are turning earthly materials like flowers, sticks and sand into art ahead of the celebration.
Crista Cammaroto: My name is Crista Cammaroto. I'm an interdisciplinary artist. I teach photography and sculpture, and I've been doing these Terra Forma series, which was really born out of our local Charlotte. I've been doing it since 2016.
Turmeric and beet powder stained Cammaroto’s hands, and red clay had dug in beneath her fingernails. She inserted daffodil leaves into the clay sculpture as she talked.
Cammaroto: I try to get things as locally as possible.
Zachary Turner: Looking at the shapes here … I see something like salamanders or some kind of embryo. Walk me through these forms.
Cammaroto: They’re definitely biomorphic, and there's always a spiral. I seem to be obsessed with the Fibonacci formula, but I do like to add legs and tails in there. We did kind of crawl out of the water onto the earth and grew legs. Salamanders are [one of the] first species to be disrupted by any kind of problem in the environment because they have permeable skin. We can't even pick them up — that could hurt them.
The daffodil leaves lay over the clay like ribs. Uprooted creeping jenny plants hugged the inside of the clay spiral, lumps of dirt still clinging to the roots. Eight bamboo shoots jutted out from the central sculpture. Volunteer sculptor Jessica Carter shoveled sand between two shoots.
Jessica Carter: This is a play ray. These sand sections are where people will engage with the Terra Forma. They'll get to play with different elements of nature and get their hands involved — get their senses involved.
Cammaroto: I'll have trays and trays of springtime, natural objects and natural things— blossoms, berries, leaves, sticks — and they can make their own art within this art.
Turner: What does Earth Day mean to you?
Cammaroto: Well, Earth Day is probably my most important holiday because, finally, people are paying attention to the earth that sustains us. I don't consider it preaching to the choir anymore — I consider it keeping the choir loud enough to be heard and considered and active enough for change to happen.
Turner: And what do you hope people are going to get out of tomorrow’s Charlotte Earth Day?
Cammaroto: I think they're going to get a lot of really good information from a lot of really good organizations that work so hard to kind of keep things from getting worse. They're also working hard on trying to make things better.
