Since the 1990s, Scherpenberg began to work with her own body in pieces of performance art recorded in video and photography. Scherpenberg understands her landscape ‘interventions’ as an extension of her work in painting, a further testament to her deep engagement with her materials. The artist applied iron oxide in a variety of geometric markings and forms across the sand on Boa Viagem beach, Niteroi, Brazil, the sand acting as a surface for her abstract composition.

In the public space of the beach, passers-by interacted with the piece, disrupting her ‘painting’ and spreading the works through the sand as they walked. In the photograph, the incoming tide serves to further wash away the pigment. The piece acted as a vehicle for Scherpenberg’s meditation on the ephemeral and passing nature of landscape. In some of Scherpenberg’s abstract paintings, metals combined with detergents such as saltwater lead to the materials disintegrating on the surface, possessing an ephemerality similar to that of the pigments washing away on the beach.