Starting Point

The task I have set myself for this weeklong project in Utah is to test out my thoughts on land arts as a practice of place making. My MA Site And Archive Intervention research has been investigating places in an urban context in relation to uses of place and in particular 'democratic places'. Here in Utah, my application of these ideas centres on how remote and inaccessible spaces can be seen as 'place'. What are the measures for these particular circumstances of place?

The closeness of the relationship of some, but not all, land art works successfully achieve this. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt's Sun Holes  are two key works for discussion.

Tomorrow we travel to Torrey, Utah, our base for the San Rafael Swell area. I'll be delivering a lecture which I hope will develop a set of reference points that will encourage a dialogue within the project about site, experience and the phenomenology of landscape. Over the course of the week we will be visiting sites and hiking and making interactions and interventions as we go. With these references set in our thinking, the opportunity to share the 'reading' of sites and discuss perceptual experience will hopefully reveal a great deal about what we notice, value or dismiss in the landscape.

It's snowing today and cold, it's not what you might expect from a desert state. Everything is contingent on natural processes, a theme which will be at the forefront of the project.