A Few More Images

Here's a few more images of recent drawings before I devote myself almost exclusively to Australia-related posts for the next month (I leave tomorrow!)

History of the World

Mt. Mound

Orb

Missing

Mist

Matt Coolidge and CLUI

Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is one of the strangest and most relevant operations about land in the United States.

The CLUI Land Use Database is an on-line computer database of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States. It is a free public resource, designed to educate and inform the public about the function and form of the National landscape, a terrestrial system that has been altered to accommodate the complex demands of our society.

Below is a brief portrait of CLUI and its founder, Matt Coolidge, courtesy of KNME New Mexico.

See more Artisodes.

Catherine Harris and Land Arts of the American West UNM

The video below is an example of the kind of work done in Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico. It is a collaboration led by Catherine Harris, professor of Art and Ecology in the Department of Art and Art History at UNM. Harris demonstrated measuring space through comparative body/landscape studies such as stride patterning, using the lower leg as a transit level, and line of sight spatial marking. Harris worked with Land Arts students to develop the project, Transect Collaborative, which involved walking a transect line across Lobo Canyon, documenting it via drawings, photographs, and video, then developing a gallery installation.



View more Land Arts videos on Vimeo.

Dean Sewell and Field Studies

Social documentary photographer Dean Sewell spent time travelling with artists in the Field Studies program in 2009. His photo of the drought affected Murray River Basin (below) won him the prestigious Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize. His photos documenting the devastation in Indonesia from the 2004 tsunami are extremely affecting and well worth a look.

Dry Riverbed in the Murray River Basin, South Australia

Calperum Station, Riverland Biosphere Reserve

One of the locations we'll be exploring in Australia is Calperum Station in the Riverland Biosphere Reserve. What is a Biosphere Reserve? I didn't know. The Parks and Reserves page on the Australian Government's website, says: 'Biosphere Reserve' is an international designation made by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) on the basis of nominations submitted by countries participating in the Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB).

One interesting distinction of a Biosphere Reserve is that "people are an integral component." In other words, it exists to a large extent to promote and develop sustainable living practices.

The Riverland Biosphere is largely made up of mallee woodlands, mostly eucalypts. "Mallee" is a term describing the habit of growth where several stems grow from a mallee root just below ground level. "The Mallee scrubland of Australia is one of the most endangered vegetation types in the world, with approximately 80 per cent cleared for agriculture in the past 150 years. The mallee, like many parts of Australia, has not responded well to imposed European style land use. In the past the fragile soils and vegetation have been overexposed to grazing and inappropriate land use." (Australian Government website, Parks and Reserves)

Mallee Eucalypt

John Fahey

I've been listening to a lot of folk music, acoustic guitar and and their derivations. Came across this video of one of the best musicians I've heard.

The Desert

From Paul Shepard's Man in the Landscape:

Silence and emptiness convey divine immanence by their lack of prosaic forms. The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical. It is always described as boundless and empty, but the human experience there is never merely existential. Its solitude is a not-empty void, a not-quiet silence. Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands.

The Western Edge of Albuquerque, NM