Description
This is a premier monograph for collectors of Land Art, Environmental Art, and Contemporary South African Design. Published in 2005 (by Protea Boekhuis), Sculpting the Land is the first major book dedicated to the work of Strijdom van der Merwe, South Africa’s most prominent land artist and a recipient of the prestigious Jackson Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.
As a land artist Strijdom van der Merwe uses the materials provided by the chosen site. His sculptural forms take shape in relation to the landscape. It is a process of working with the natural world using sand, water, wood, rocks, etc. He shapes these elements into geometrical forms that participate with their environment, continually changing until their final probable destruction. He observes the fragility of beauty while not lamenting its passing. What remains is a photographic image, a fragment of the imagination. While a visual record is materially all that is left, he also leaves us a reminder of the capacity, however feeble, of an individual to alter the universe by embracing the ceaseless changing of nature, actively contributing to it and in so doing, modulating and beautifying the outcome.
