The Michael Oak Waldorf School Fair was held under sunny Cape Town skies and the guiding theme of Earthsense, this past weekend. A new experience for visitors this year was Grandma's Fever Bed: installation art created by Grade 8 children, under the guidance of Tossie van Tonder, using mainly discarded car tyres and computer parts - powerful symbols of contradiction between modern life's dependencies and the need to preserve our environment.
Explaining the thinking behind the installation, Tossie writes in the school's newsletter:
The installation aims to show the under belly of what surrounds our community - in a manner that portrays the irony inherent in our relationship with our most valued objects of movement and knowledge. Working with these materials has showed me the tenacity of the teenagers, their stamina to confront, engage and creatively design themselves into a fearless partnership with objects and their meaning in our lives.
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This way we face concepts we reluctantly continue with, and simultaneously deny, at the cost of our ethos as a school. Creativity has many facets, and by bringing the creative desire into our home we dismantle our fears. There is nothing more abject than an object that has outlived its usefulness but has not yet been recycled.
Set under the embracing canopy of a large tree on the school grounds, the installation provided a theatre for the children to engage with the bed:
This performance installation hints at the merging of modern technology and ancient wisdom. The essence of this fusion lies embedded in the seed. What is a seed? The energetic blueprint for what is to come, or only a thought? Is there a seed in desire? A seed senses when to start growing. What soil is needed for a particular seed?
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