Introduction to "Megadriftwood": Driftwood Art / Earth Art   This gallery of 'megadriftwood' (surrealist found objects) or naturally occurring 'driftwood art' was assembled from photographed pieces of driftwood in the northern California area, along the Pacific coast. Involuntary driftwood art (a.k.a. involuntary driftwood sculpture, oceanic sculpture) acquires its visually stimulating characteristics through interactions with sunlight, saltwater and mechanical abrasion via ocean waves. All of the photos on this page are from 2003. The word 'megadriftwood' is used here because these wooden objects were quite large, often seen reclining on a bed of sand or gravel, and were very striking, readily contrasting with the inorganic sands and rocks of the immediate costal areas. The presence of these driftwood objects, especially the more anthropomorphic ones, creates a sense of mystery within the beaches (sometimes secluded) they inhabited. On these poetically fertile sand beds the imagination can take root! Driftwood fragments can also be considered 'involuntary art,' 'earth art' and 'found art,' and appeared frequently during my wanderings of various beaches. Their beauty resides in their creation through the forces of nature, hence the term 'earth art.' At the time of photographing them, I did not always know what images would later become visible in the final pictures, but only that my intuition told me there might be something interesting to see in this or that piece. Sometimes, all that was necessary was to simply rotate the developed photo 180 degrees in order to have an image reveal itself within the natural curves of the wood, similar to Salvador Dali's "paranoiac-critical method." The second part of the process, after the photography, was to eliminate the background part of the images (sand, gravel, weeds, etc.) and then to alter the color tinting, allowing the image to be visible in a new light. Driftwood art, indeed. For some photography purists this kind of editing might be undesirable, but for the purpose of hunting surrealist objects, it was the object itself that mattered, and in this particular instance, not the contextual background nor the original colors of the wood. Whether the viewer regards these images as specimens of earth art, found art (in the sense that the driftwood pieces were made not by human hands but instead by natural forces), or merely the photography of 'Nature,' they are also surrealist in that they represent a sublime yet materialized confrontation between human imagination and the external environment (in this case, a very natural, non-urban environment). In particular then, they are examples of the surrealist found object, or objet trouve. For surrealism, any object immediately becomes a found object when it is 1) serendipitously perceived or found by an observer, and most importantly, 2) when it coincides with the inner desires and imagination of the observer, as a concrete example of objective chance. This particular kind of surrealist object can be pivotal in enabling the seeker/wanderer to identify his or her own inner reality and innermost desires, especially through an external source. The surrealist found object has the power to do what television, religion, and ideology cannot. Finally, these wooden found objects are surreal because help erase the boundaries which segregate 'Art' from nature, from life, and from reality itself. In recent centuries, 'Modern Art' has been completely alienated from the environment(s) that created it, but in these megadriftwood images, the alienation of art from the rest of reality is temporarily dissolved. If aesthetics play any role in this process, then the role is miniscule, in comparison to the importance of the poetic experience.

copyright 2003, 2004,  Eric W. Bragg