Mapping with/in

In writing about artists who work with the earth, one finds a variety of ways they are creating mapping structures. Edward Casey, writer, details four different ways of mapping: mapping of, mapping for, mapping with/in, and mapping out as they relate to earthworks. (xx) ‘Mapping of’ is a cartographic way of putting down exact geography and using engineering applications. The ‘mapping for’ approach gets us from place A to place B. In ‘mapping with/in’, the viewer is given only a faint indication of land relationships. There is more of a sensing and psychological feel to the work. In this type of mapping, the artist is bodily present in a kinesthetic and ambulatory way. It is here in the ‘mapping with/in’ that I find two artists of interest and who both have strong ways of ‘mapping out’ or relating their experiences to the viewer. Comparing artists Richard Long and Cecilia Vicuna, both contemporaries of each other, who have been marking the land with lines, describing their experiences with text, documenting with photographs, and creating sculptures of natural materials, and who have strong mapping sensibilities should be an interesting journey in itself.
Richard Long is a British artist who was born in Bristol, England, in 1945. He has been known as an artist who uses walking as his art form. His first ‘walk’ in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field. From there he has been taking walks through many remote places in the world. He wrote about his work in The Real World: Pick Up Sticks,
“My art is about working in the wide
World, wherever, on the surface of the earth…
My work is not urban, not is it romantic.
It is the laying down of modern ideas in
The only practical places to take them.
The natural world sustains the industrial world.”(Kastner 242)
Richard Long has been making art works based on the motion of his body through walking and the marks that he leaves behind without invasive changes to the land. His is an art of physical involvement, but one that only leaves behind the feeling of his presence through the manipulation of natural objects. In Crossing Stones, 1987, he carried a stone from the east coast at Aldenburgh, England to the west coast at Aberystwyth, Wales and left it there only to do the same for the trip back. The stories of these walks are told by words laid out in the shape of the walk or visual line: observations, measurements of distance and duration are another dimension of his experiences. Once the stones trade environments, the walk is complete. The stones are then indeterminately moved by weather, water, and wind. Nothing stays the same and yet we know that these two stones exist somewhere in traded space. Long also used journals, photographs, collections of natural materials to map out this experience, along with actual maps overlaid with drawn lines of the journey. His walking becomes an absorptive mapping. He states, “My work is about my senses, my instinct, my own scale, and my own physical commitment. My work is real, not illusory or conceptual”. (Kastner 242)
“Cecilia Vicuna also works with lines, found objects in the landscape and words in the forms of both poetry and quoted connections. She also looks for the indeterminate and ephemeral in her work. Born in Chile and exiled since the 70’s, she moved to England and then back to Bogota, Columbia. She maps her space in nature with found materials, weavings and poetry. In 1966, she began making small sculptures of natural objects and found rubbish from the land called “precarios. Her first outdoor sculpture called Con-con was a fragile collection of refuse (driftwood, feathers, stones, trash) situated on the beach between a river and the ocean where lots of garbage collected. She has a desire to order things and her discarded, found materials are composed so that each element holds the next one in a balanced, fragile state. She says “Everything is falling apart because of lack of connections. Weaving is the connection that is missing, the connection between people and themselves, people and nature.” (de Zegher, 11) Vicuna has a deep sense of connection to her culture, to the historical traditions of women’s work (specifically weaving) and to her country’s history. She uses found garbage as land sculptures to push forth the idea of giving the rubbish value and refers to the government’s disposal of people during the seventies (the disappeared ones…desaparecidos). Added to these small sculptures was the act of weaving space. In her weaving called Antivero, 1981, she crisscrossed the threads from one rock bank of the river to the other side creating a cradle or nest-like structure producing the form of a protected space. As she quotes Rene Guenon – “the connection protects”.(deZegher, 89) Coming from a country in turmoil, tied to the native culture of the Andes and speaking into a global avant-garde, creates a complex body of work speaking about connecting and protecting.
Both Cecilia Vicuna and Richard Long design their work to be temporary although their text works and some sculptures have been moved into gallery spaces for shows. The concern for the environment, marking the land gently, and allowing themselves as artists to stand back and allow nature to change these art works are their common ground. Although Long has a stronger sense of imposing geometry on the land with some large rock pieces, whereas Vicuna’s sculptures are asymmetrical and delicate. It is in the mapping out where they diverge the most. Long has imposed order on the landscapes of his choosing. Although human presence is absent from his work, implied presence is felt in the manmade geometric shapes formed in remote environments. He has staged a landscape and one might feel the ‘man subduing the earth’ philosophy and an evoking of Post-colonial thought. Vicuna is about connecting people to the space. She is about the relationships: references and points of departure, about disappearance and concern for the earth. She says “We are made of throwaways and we will be thrown away, says the objects.”(de Zegher 21)
Between these two artists who are both working with the land, with natural materials, with texts and poems, and during the same decades: they are both concerned for the delicate balance between humanity and the environment. Yet one is imposing a geometric order on the land with a strong aesthetic sensibility and only implies human presence and the other is weaving together humanity’s presence with nature, looking for the connection that will protect the earth.
Odd that in the beginning of looking at these two artists, they seemed so close, but after pushing past the surface of materials and processes, one finds a huge difference in the philosophy of their art. In both artists, the mapping with/in is at the core of their similarities, but the mapping out is where the differences lie. What we as viewers take away from seeing either Richard Long’s or Cecilia Vicuna’s work will vary once we spend time with the work: two seemingly similar earth artists, can go in two very different emotional and aesthetic directions but both artists in their own styles, speak of their love for the earth.

Works Cited
Casey, Edward. Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Long, Richard. Richard Long: Walking A Line. Thames and Hudson, London, 2002. Essays by Anne Seymour, Paul Moorhouse, Denise Hooker and Richard Long.

De Zegher, M. Catherine, ed. Inside The Visible: an elliptical traverse of 20th century art/ in, of, and from the feminine. Cambridge, MIT Press, exhibition catalog ICA Boston, January 30, 1996-may 12, 1996.

De Zegher, M. Catherine. Cecilia Vicuna’s Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots. The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna. University Press of New England, Hanover & London. 1997.

Kastner, J. and Brian Wallis. Land and Environmental Art, Phaidon Press Ltd, 1998.

Moorehouse, Paul. The Intricacy of the Skein, The Complexity of the Web: Richard Long’s Art. Richard Long: Walking A Line. Thames and Hudson, London, 2002.

Smith, Roberta. 4 Artists and the Map: Image/Process/Data?Place. Jasper Johns, Nancy Graves, Roger Welch, Richard Long. Exhibition Catalog. Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence. April 5-May 24, 1981.