Letha Wilson's work is part sculpture, part photography, and I love how each plays just as important a role in her pieces.
Richard Long
Richard Long has been a strong influence on me as a photographer for about ten years now. His work appeals to me on several levels, among them, the hiker inside me. My favorite pieces of his are any of the lines made by walking. In making these sculptures by walking, he is "echoing the whole history of mankind." Rebecca Solnit devotes some of her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, a book I highly recommend, to Richard Long's art.
A Line Made By Walking, England 1967
England 1968
His work is as much performance art as it is anything else. Similarly to Andy Goldsworthy, his work lives in the ephemeral, and were it not for a photographic record, or in other instances, text works, there would be no evidence of Long ever having made his sculpture.
Leaving the Stones, A Five Day Walk With Dogs on Spitzbergen, Svalbard Norway 1995
Pujet Sound Mud Circle, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 1997
Visit Richard's website to view more work.
Nancy Holt
Back in 2008 I wrote about Robert Smithson, and how influential he and his writings were becoming on my art then. Through all that reading I learned about Nancy Holt, who was married to Smithson. I really only remember getting familiar with only one of her works, Sun Tunnels in north-western Utah.
Holt, who passed away in 2014, really was quite a prolific artist. Many of her works no longer exist, due either to their intentional ephemerality, or to their being destroyed, as in the case of her Missoula Ranch Locators (1972), which was destroyed so that the owners of the property could build a home.
Her work was made to be an interactive experience. At Sun Tunnels, the viewer stands in one of four concrete tubes and looks through holes cut into walls that line up with certain constellations. Or, the viewer might look through two tunnels to see the sun rise and set at the winter solstice, or the other two tunnels to see the sun rise and set at the summer solstice. Through this interaction, or participation, Holt views her pieces are fully complete.
“I have a strong desire to make people conscious of the cyclical time of the universe”
If you feel like making the trek to the Sun Tunnels, you can find some info here: Sun Tunnels info from Utah Museum Fine Arts
And you check out the Sun Tunnels on Google Earth
You can read more about Holt here.
Robert Smithson
I’ve missed two posts here at 52Photographers.com, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been looking at other photographers. Quite the contrary. I’ve been looking at many photographers and artists working in other media, but school has made it a little harder to actually put together a post about any of those artists, however short they may be.
One artist I have been looking at, and who wrote quite prolifically, is the late Robert Smithson. As the creator of the Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, he is quite well known. Along with looking at his own photographs and photographs of his environmental sculptures, I have been reading a lot of his essays that he wrote and were published in several art magazines in the late Sixties and early Seventies before his untimely death in 1973.
Smithsons work and theories of art are completely fascinating to me, and are rapidly becoming quite influential in my own work.
Here are my most favorite sculptures:
Spiral Jetty
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy is more of a sculptor than a photographer, though without the camera much of his art work wouldn’t be seen by many people or any at all. Much of his work deals with the ephemeral and the transient, and the more I see his work and the more I read about him and his art the more I love it.
I am totally amazed at how sensitive Goldsworthy is to the environment he works in, and how out of place and alien he feels when he is in a new environment.
All his sculptures are made with materials found locally in the environment in which the sculpture is made. All the tools he uses are mostly other rocks, sticks, his mouth, his hands.
Check out one of his many books; my favorite so far is “Time.” Also there is a documentary titled “Rivers and Tides” that is well worth watching.