Earthworks Scrapbook
SOIL – The “skin of the earth.” Soil is the mixture of minerals, organic matter, gases, liquids, and countless organisms that together support plant life. Soil is a medium for plant growth, a means of water storage, supply and purification, a modifier of the Earth’s atmosphere and a habitat for organisms who change the soil.
“There the transfiguration of all living and inanimate forms occurs before our eyes, the gift of immortality a direct consequence of the surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identities.”
― JG Ballard, The Crystal World, 1966
“The creation of life from clay can be seen as a miraculous birth theme that appears throughout world religions and mythologies.... As such, this class of story falls within a larger set of divine or cosmogonic origin stories about creation, whether through divine
emergence or divine craft.”
― wikipedia, Creation of life from clay
“The great concerns of our time – climate change, natural resources, food production, water control and conservation, and human health – all boil down to the condition of the soil.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding
This invisible landscape
“Our flat perspectives feel increasingly inadequate.”
Robert McFarlane, Underland
*Beyond colours, contours, light and horizons, a landscape is shaped by dynamic forces — the soil, the plants, the trees, the weather. It is the wild aliveness of the world.**
Our relationship with this often-invisible landscape is essential to understanding who we are and how we belong to this world.
Soil forms a bridge between the visible and the unseen. It holds cultural meaning — symbolizing both our beginning and our end. Across cultures, myths speak of humans formed from earth, while contemporary science explores the idea that life may have emerged from clay.
Art institutions are grounded, quite literally, in soil. Yet they often function as though disconnected from it — sealed off from the ground that nurtured local culture, from the earth in which art itself has deep roots. The very soil that sustains and surrounds us is often absent from our lives.
Created *with* the landscape, not just of it. Shaped by natural forces — earth, water, wind, light — mayerials: soil and mineral pigments, organic cotton, olivine, chalk, and ochres. Weather, growprocesses, food, time or tide. A way of capturing this composition of forces.
Not made to last — a moment in the creative process. Compostable. Will once again become landscapes. Decaying into fragrant soil, rotting and sprouting, blooming, dying, and regenerate the earth. A creative process with a future, a life cycle ofthe work.
The underground is a starting point for many myths and rituals. The story of Persephone, The shamanistic Lower World.The tales of death and resurrection, cycles of life.
We are perishable matter yearning for meaning, and time is both the matter and the meaning of our lives. “Time is a river that sweeps me along but I am the river,” Borges wrote in 1940. “Time is the substance I am made of.” source: themarginalian
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