sticks and stones

Yesterday I saw part of a great documentary called "Being Here - The Art of Dan Horgan" on Californian gardener, landscape designer, artist Dan Horgan. Horgan responds to the landscape by making cairns and drystone sculptures from local rock, sticks, stones and sand. He creates sensitive, beautiful, ephemeral works. One scene of the documentary showed a beautiful silvery green olive grove planted years earlier. His work is similar to the work of Andy Goldsworthy.


I love the way these two men draw attention to the rugged untamed landscape by creating a man-made object. These sculptures respond so directly to their materials and over time gradually , or violently erode leaving ....the landscape.

Over the years I have been very inspired by Andy Goldsworthy and in fact the "Nest " series of bowls that I wrote about in the previous blog were partly inspired by Goldsworthy's "Midsummer Snowballs"

I loved everything about this project from the collecting of snow in the deepest winter and creating huge snowballs filled with rocks, wool, and sticks through to transporting the huge snowballs to a frozen food factory which was the only place big enough to store them until midsummer! Eventually these snowballs ended up on the streets of London and I love the stories of what happened to them, one got kicked to bits by drunks, one was in the way of stall holders at the Spitalfields markets and was gently lifted from place to place until it disapeared.