Landscape art

I have been building landscape art all my life. As a child it was customary, when out hill walking, to add a stone to the cairns that crowned the summits of the hills. The cairn is just a pile of stones raised to mark a path (they show up well in silhouette in a foggy hill top) or a summit, and many times I've been grateful for a chain of cairns to show, one section at a time, the route off a cloud-bound mountain.

While a student, I read an article, which set me thinking about the shamanistic qualities of cairns, and I found myself drawn to reconstruct cairns that had collapsed, and then to construct entirely new cairns on my walks.

Ironically, it was on my first trip to California that I first came across Andy Goldsworthy's book "Stone" and began to understand my cairns as landscape art, and began to think of my other creations as sculpture. I have also explored the representation of landscape in steel as well as the cairn form in steel sculpture and landscape forms in electronic media.

Bough Cairn

A site-specific construction (2004), on indefinite loan to The Studio Gallery, Armonk, New York.

The Old Croton Aqueduct Project

The OCA project was carried out for the "Outside/In" show I curated at the Exchange Gallery in White Plains, New York in 2004. I constructed a series of cairns along the route of the aqueduct in Westchester County New York, documented them, and made a web-based georeferenced photo archive to explore the works from the gallery. The photos were also displayed along the line of a sculpture representing the aqueduct.

Three cairns were displayed in the gallery, displayed along side a computer work "Circumnavigation".

Circumnavigation, 2004

Cairn translations

Cairn translations are reconstructions of a single cairn in multiple locations. The same stones are reassembled in different places, with subtly different configurations, highlighting the different resonances a cairn has with its surroundings and playing with our expectations of inertia and stasis.

Bhumisparsamudra
Mudra Cairns
Hudson cairn
"Thirty-six views of a cairn
in the Hudson Valley"

Getty Museum, LA

LA, USA

Videos of cairns

Landscape Art
Cairn in a stream, New York.
Landscape Art
Beach sunset cairn, LA.
Landscape Art
Cairn in the surf, LA.

Cairns and cairn collections


`Man and Rock in the Shimshal Valley'

A set of photographs showing the interactions between people and the environment in the Shimshal valley in Pakistan.



Chimborazo, Ecuador

Hola Vida, Ecuador

Seaside, Oregon, USA

Seaside, Oregon, USA

Waterfall cairn, Japan

Coastal cairn, Australia

Point Lenana, Mount Kenya

Mount Kenya

Smooth cairn, Ireland

Pinnacle, The Burren, Ireland

Cairn line, Ireland

Opposite Tryfan, Wales

Hollow cairn Ward Pound Ridge Reservation

Hollow cairn in spring

Tree cairns

Wooden cairn

Delaware water gap, USA

Arch, Acadia national park, USA

Lakeside cairn, Harriman State Park, USA

A journey past several cairns in Corsica

Argentiere, France

Karakoram highway, Pakistan

Smoky Mountains, USA
Just for fun, you can also see my first electronic cairn.