Wedding to the Sea

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The wedding was produced by Luke Dixon of the International Workshop Festival. So we also did a five-day workshop that led up to the wedding. Fourteen people attended our Making Love into Art and Art into Love Workshop, then presented their creations at the wedding. It poured rain most of the five days, and cleared up just in time for the wedding. Our Mistress of Ceremonies was Veronica Hart, the lovely adult film star and director. The owner of Grove House, Polly McLean, provided a beautiful environment in which to do the wedding. As some folks wanted to bring their children, we decided to stretch our boundaries and try to do a “family friendly” performance event. Something we have never done before! It was a real challenge, but we all pulled it off without a glitch. (A more detailed story to follow soon. For more info about the collaborators view the program.) Photos by Del La Grace Volcano, Sarah Ainsley, and Petra Joy.

| ARTISTS’ STATEMENT | ECO-SEXUAL BLUE WEDDING TO THE SEA

WE ARE THE LOVE ART LABORATORY, an artist couple dedicated to doing art projects that explore, generate, and celebrate love. We orchestrate performance art weddings in collaboration with various international communities. Each wedding is site-specific, interactive, and utilizes a different theme and color based on the seven chakra system (inspired by artist Linda Montano’s 14 Years of Living Art.) The Love Art Laboratory grew out of our response to the violence of war, the anti-gay marriage movement, and the corporate greed causing the destruction of our planet. Our projects are symbolic gestures, which aim to instill hope, to be an antidote to fear, and act as a call to action.

THIS PAST YEAR, WE MARRIED the Earth in a magnificent redwood tree grove in California, we married the Sky in Oxford, England, and we had what may have been the first queer wed- ding in the Balkans, in Zagreb, Croatia. Hundreds of people attended these weddings and helped to create them through their generous collaborations.

FOR OUR SEVENTH WEDDING, AND IN OUR BLUE YEAR, we will marry the Sea. We are passionately in love with her and desire to take care of her in order to help save her. We are eco-sexuals, meaning that we find nature incredibly romantic, extraordinarily sensual, and an exquisite lover. Additionally, we are “sexecologists,” who combine sexology and ecology, and we intend to make the environmental movement a little sexier.

WHY MARRY THE SEA IN VENICE? During the Renaissance, the Doge (chief magistrate) de- creed that, “Venice must marry the sea as a man marries a women and thus become her Lord.” So each year the Doge would go out on a boat and drop a ring into the water. But can people really Lord over the Sea? What is perfectly clear is that people do have the power to destroy her, and are rapidly doing so. We will follow the tradition of marrying the Sea in Venice — as two women who have moved beyond the dominant-male and submissive-female dynamic, as seduc- tive eco-sexual artists, and as global citizens who care deeply about the welfare of our planet.

THE FEAR SOCIETY PAVILION IS THE PERFECT PLACE for this wedding as we are afraid of the total destruction of our beautiful environment. The Sea has a fast growing cancer made of islands of plastic the size of Texas. She is suffocating from gasses caused by our pollution. Glob- ally, 90% of her large fish have been wiped out. She’s overheating. Her reefs have been brutally destroyed. She’s being raped and… Need we go on? And we simply can’t live without her.

LOVING THE SEA EROTICALLY takes us all deliciously deep, deep, deep inside our primordial selves. Our bodies are made largely of water so in fact we are the Sea. We hope that our guests will take vows to love and protect Sea along with us. Now let’s get wet!

ELIZABETH M. STEPHENS & ANNIE M. SPRINKLE