3. INFLUENCES
My work compares human activity with geologic activity to see how our actions compete with and scale to natural processes. I do this to build landscape knowledge while having conversations about direct human action and climate change.
When I think back at the art I’ve loved over the years, it’s no surprise to me that I’m moving a stone on foot northward 1,000 miles (1600km) to the mouth of the Arctic Ocean.
For this specific project I’m influenced by specific projects of several artists:
David Nash’s Wooden Boulder, in which a white oak tree was carved into a boulder that Nash released into a river in 1978 and proceeded to track the movements of this “stone” over the next several decades until it disappeared.
Matt Baker’s Erratic, in which hikers encounter a boulder in a field and are invited to drag the erratic as far and as long as they like, leaving it wherever they decide is far enough to move the stone.
Com & Com’s emphasis on conviviality in Bloch as a Swiss spruce travels to every continent acting as a sort of global talking stick:
Com & Com’s Bloch in Bern, Switzerland (2012), (at bloch.art)
Richard Long’s rare and concise statement “I like the simplicity of walking, the simplicity of stones.”
The ideas of displacement and replacement in Michael Heizer’s works.
Francis Alÿs’ Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, in which he pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts nine hours later:
Francis Alÿs, Mexico City 1997 (public domain)
Section XIX of Conrad Aiken’s poem Prelude for Memnon describing the quiet changes taking place in the natural world:
XIX
Watch long enough, and you will see the leaf
Fall from the bough. Without a sound it falls:
And soundless meets the grass … And so you have
A bare bough, and a dead leaf in dead grass.
Something has come and gone. And that is all.
But what were all the tumults in this action?
What wars of atoms in the twig, what ruins,
Fiery and disastrous, in the leaf?
Timeless the tumult was, but gave no sign.
Only, the leaf fell, and the bough is bare.
This is the world: there is no more than this.
The unseen and disastrous prelude, shaking
The trivial act from the terrific action.
Speak: and the ghosts of change, past and to come,
Throng the brief word. The maelstrom has us all.
I often think about the tumult was in the glacier that moved this granite boulder. How did it break off, and what did it look like when it started the journey? The soft roundness of the stone that I hold in my hands does not show the fissured and angular facets of the fractured rock it started out as when the glacier found it.
And lastly, Hamish Fulton’s walking works like Glacial Boulder, and the 2016 exhibition A Decision To Choose Only Walking at Galerie Tschudi in Switzerland.
