Column, earth, wood, 1997

Sculpture from degree / thesis show at Loughborough College of Art, 1997. This piece  was made using a plywood mold in 2 sections. prior to dumping any of the dirt inside i insert the "space frame" a sol le wit ish construction. this exo skeleton was intended to help keep the piece together. however when it came time to deinstall the sculpture withstood several blows from a pick axe to even put a dent in it. in the end i had to push it over. which given that i thought in was going to fall over is pretty cool.

this general idea with this piece was to create something that was life size, by which i mean to scale with with me the artist. i was influenced by david smith at the time and his idea of a piece that one could see over, …. just…. on tip toes. the rest of the installation had a piece the was much taller than a person (the pyramid) and one that in longer than a person but on the floor and one that we can step over easily.

of the whole installation this piece became the most "representational" in the sense that it immediately resembled a core sample taken from the earth. the part about the piece i found most fascinating was how the sections of earth transcribed my moods. for instance there was a period when i was working when i was feeling very discombobulated later on i could point out that specific section so in that sense the column recorded a moment in time.

Untitled (?), dirt, 1993

This is a photograph of the first “land art” i made and the first collaboration i really made. Dated somewhere between 1993 and 1994, this piece was the result of a collaboration between Simon Hankinson and myself. For me i found the whole process of collaborating on this piece very hard. at the time i had no idea what i wanted to do with the piece, and it really did not relate directly at all to what i was doing in the studio. Simon has this idea of cutting into the landscape, and neither of us had heard of Michael Heizer at the time. So we selected a clearing, in a copse of trees, half way up a hill, on the foothills of the Pennines. It lay across the M62 from the village of Outlane. The copse was in a public area accessed by trudging thru a golf course. So for several, usually soggy, saturdays we went up to this area and bumbled about first with string and so forth to lay out a patch to cut and then spades and shovels to clear 2-3 inches of sod from the ground and expose a wide but shallow trench. Presumably it’s overgrown and gone at this point. perhaps a minor dimple still exists marking our exertions. One day maybe i’ll go back up there and take a look and see if i can find it again. Anyhow this was during my time at Dewsbury College (now Batley School of Art i think). The faculty weren’t encouraging us to do much of anything at the time, let alone collaborate with each other (god forbid) or making land art. So in that sense this was a great project for me at the time as it opened my eyes up to other ways of working that weren’t just marks on paper or daubing on canvas. But i was way too closed off in my thinking to really appreciate what we were doing or why. It’s funny how i spent most of my youth trying to be this really conventional (traditional) artist and now i’m older i really don’t care less. Shouldn’t it work the other way round, blaze a trail in your youth and get more refined with age? i guess that’s the avant garde way, so i missed that boat too… i dunno. any how i’ve totally lost touch with Simon now and i’d really like to get in touch with him, so Simon if you’ve been googling yourself and found this web page / image please email me at tburtonwood@gmail.com i’d love to catch up and see what you are working on.