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.
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".
Mudra Cairns |
"Thirty-six views of a cairn in the Hudson Valley" |
Getty Museum, LA |
LA, USA |
Cairn in a stream, New York. |
Beach sunset cairn, LA. |
Cairn in the surf, LA. |