Lines of Descent by Ryan Dewey: The Great Lakes region had already been covered with 600 meters of glacial clay when the remains of the Laurentide Ice Sheet made a final retreat and melted into a puddle that amounts to 21% of the world’s available fresh water. It’s a flat region, with some of the only exposed rock faces peeking out along the shorelines of the lakes and on the limestone islands that dot the edges of the lakes. Some of these islands have glacial grooves that were carved as the ice sheet carried granite boulders south from Canada into the northern United States.

I’ve been visiting these grooves since childhood, and once while lying in the groove I imagined the weight of the glacier pushing down on granite to carve these flutes into the limestone. I began to empathize with the glacier and felt I needed to try to replicate the motion at human scale to better understand the process. This led to the construction of a glacial hand tool, a block of ice with three granite stones frozen in place which I grind back and forth on a slab of limestone to scribe a line until the ice melts and the hand tool falls apart. I’ve performed this work at several sites of glacial significance in the northern United States.

One of those sites is the driftless region, an isolated spot where the Laurentide Ice Sheet did not scour the landscape. While I was exploring the area I came across a historic rural cemetery. I began to think about what this cemetery would look like if a glacier moved across the field in the future, grabbing tombstones and carrying them like boulders to grind away the ground. I made my first model landscape that day with wooden tombstones, slabs of clay, and field measurements taken with knots on a ball of string.

Around that same time, it became apparent to me that the repetitive back and forth motion of the hand held glacial tool was reminiscent of using a carpenter’s hand plane. So I began to think about the types of blades and styles of hand planes that are found in a carpenter’s workshop. While on residency in a tiny mountain village in Switzerland, I met a carpenter who taught me the names of the different hand planes he used and I started to think more about the way that combinations of different hand planes could produce the complex grooving patterns of decorative architectural moulding which is made in both wood and plaster. And further, I began to explore how hand planes could combine to produce moldings with sections that matched the contours of glacial grooves.

When a glacier picks up a granite boulder it pushes that boulder through the ground which wears away both the substrate and the cutting tool. The variation in the groove patterns reflects the variation in cutting materials and the rate of consumption of the granite boulders since mass is lost during transport. This presents an opportunity for landscape design. At the scale of landscape, it should be possible to place stones in a particular sequence and allow a glacier to grab those stones and carve a somewhat predictable pattern based on the array and sequence of the stones. These “implements for future glacial scouring” are one of the ways that I collaborate with geologic forces of the next ice age. As part of my speculative practice I place latent objects in various sites and abandon them to the deep future.

At some point I made the connection that cemeteries already prime landscapes for future glacial scouring in a highly formalized way. The arrays of granite memorial stones provide a ready field of cutting tools for the next ice age (if it ever comes).

As a species, our first tools were made of stone and we thrived because of this lithic technological advancement, so it is ironic that our contemporary tools, modes of production, and manufacturing processes have accelerated our move toward extinction as a species. We cannot deny that we are at the mercy of climate change and the planet is sweating us out in a hot fever.

In the deep past, glaciers moved granite boulders across the ground, scouring and marking the terrain before depositing these boulders erratically in the landscape. These glacial erratics dot the landscape and stand as markers of past geologic activity, similar to the way we use granite tombstones to mark the past activity of a human life. But for the glacier, granite erratics are much more than mere markers; these stones are also the mark makers, the very tool used by a glacier to shape the landscape in the process of moving the stone.

As I contextualized these thoughts with my glacial hand tool and the clay model of the cemetery, I wondered if these thoughts about glacial erratics could be adapted to our conception of tombstones as latent objects with terraforming potential. Tombstones are potential mark making tools for glaciers in the deep future, and by framing it this way, tombstones can be seen as our final stone tools, bookmarking the lifespan of our species.

Looking at the arrays of tombstones in cemetery fields, we should be able to predict what future landscape patterns might be left behind by our tombstone-erratics after the next ice age (should the planet be so lucky). The slow advancing and retreating motion of a glacier grinds grooves into bedrock much like the use of a carpenter’s hand plane to flatten and flute details in wood. For Lines of Descent, I took this idea and iterated to develop of a series of progressively complex hand planes with strange granite blades fashioned in the shape of common tombstone profiles and I used them to produce a series of landscape models to help visualize a future terrain that will be formed by the memorial stones we leave behind. The tombstone markers of familial lines meet the iterative lines of drift in the developmental process of tool-making to predict what new lines our memorials will leave in the landscape after the descent of humanity in the deep future.

Exhibition Information:
Ryan Dewey’s solo exhibition Lines of Descent was generously supported by an emergency grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and presented at The Sculpture Center (Cleveland Ohio) from 25 January to 15 March, 2019.

Ryan Dewey‘s work is a kind of ecological dreaming that takes shape as installation, performance, research, workshops, and land art to highlight the entanglements between people, places, and land use. He has been a resident at ACRE (Chicago), the Alps Art Academy (Switzerland), and the Montello Foundation (Nevada), as well as a visiting researcher in the department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland) where he wrote the open access book Hack the Experience: New Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (Punctum Books, 2018). He operates across disciplines, seeking holism through art, anthropology, business, psychology, and the geosciences to unpack the interconnectedness of people, places, and planetary change. Besides traditional galleries, his work often pops up in unexpected venues including the British Society for Geomorphology, the American Association of Geographers, Kickstarter, the University of Bern, Concordia University (Montreal), the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, the Annenberg School for Communication (Philadelphia), Progressive Insurance (Cleveland), SLA (Copenhagen), KERB (Melbourne), MONU (Rotterdam), and others.

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The great thing about going to artist residencies is that you end up in places you never thought you would go to. That’s how I got to Tenna — a tiny village in the middle of the Swiss Alps 1600m above sea level. I mention that, because I was born and raised by the sea and nothing is really higher than 10 meters (in fact, everything that is higher than 10 meters it is already considered to be a mountain). The first morning I woke up in Tenna and walked outside I found myself and the whole village covered in clouds. I remember how I couldn’t help but think, how I have never been this close to the clouds before and how much I would love to touch them. This is usually how the creative process starts for me. First there is a feeling, then there is a language. Later that day I sat down, looked at the clouds disappearing in the distance and I said: I want to catch a cloud.

© Images by Karolin Schwab, except image 3 by Felix Contzen.
Year: 2018 | Dimensions: 320 x 270 x 25 cm | Medium: gloss paint on wood

Karolin Schwab (b. 1987) is visual artist based between London and Berlin. Using site specific installation and sculpture she explores different ideas of how we perceive a landscape as well as the space and the relationship between the viewer and their ever-changing environment. Her works embrace the gentle processes and movements in everything, while also seeking to find a moment of stillness, that connects inner and outer landscape. After studying Fine Art at the University of East London (2013) and the University of Arts Berlin (2016) she participated in manifold international exhibitions and residencies in China, Switzerland, USA amongst others. In 2019 she received the Gilbert Bayes Award and became a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. Currently she is nominated for the Broomhill National Sculpture Prize 2019 and soon will go on to a 4 month residency in Denmark as recipient of the MALT AIR scholarship.

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The project is surrounded by an open, gentle meadow valley and wooded, steep forest slopes in a characteristic way. The aim of the design is to highlight precisely this contrast. The spa park (“Kurpark”) is centrally located and includes direct access to a lake. It is surrounded by flat, blooming meadowlands featuring a barefoot trail and a beekeeper’s hive. In contrast to the wide meadows, the forest park (“Waldpark”) functions as its “introvert counterpoint”.
The highlight of the forest park is the „therapeutic walking loop“. Thirteen stations are associated with human moods such as clarity, overview, openness, harmony, confusion, attentiveness, contemplation, transparency and sublimity. A landscape window (“Landschaftsfenster”) serves as a prelude to the loop. A steel grotto bridge (“Grottensteg”) leads visitors past mystical caves and rock formations. Accompanied by the “fairy sounds” of an audio installation (“Feenklang”), the loop leads to five stances featuring a signature red paint finish. The view becomes even more impressive: a former ski jump was transformed into a spectacular viewpoint including a swing. Passing a vitalizing re-naturalized spring, visitors reach the path-spider (“Wegespinne”). This is a place for resting or contemplating the loop’s many twists and turns. The loop continues through a dense forest, past a red shimmering fairy wreath (“Feenkranz”) and a poet’s clearing (“Dichterlichtung”), perfect for deep thought and reflection. Comfortable hammocks invite visitors to rest their tired legs at the end of an inspiring hike.

© All images by Claudia Dreyße

Planergruppe Oberhausen: We design free and open spaces by making space perceptible and usable. We draw the attention to the existing qualities of (city) landscapes.
Our office was founded in Oberhausen (Germany) in 1973, and since the end of 2018 we are based in Essen and Hannover. Our focus is landscape architecture and we are active in all related contemporary topics. Our range of services extends from large-scale concepts to the planning of neighbourhoods or district parks.
Our main office in the Ruhr area is located in the midst of an industry and settlement area, which allows us a detailed view on potentials and issues of the Ruhr-Emscher region. Moreover, it raises awareness for projects in other domains and areas.
Working in the domain of designing industrial landscapes has shaped our work as these spaces have an unconventionally fascinating beauty which wants to be perceived and preserved. The appreciation of the existing is the principle of our work: we discern the patterns of the existing and use architectural elements and materials with restraint yet consciously, and always with respect to the space. Whenever we intervene with our work, we do so in a retained and dedicated manner.
We are a team of long-time, experienced and young landscape architects and architects. We develop draft designs in a group and together with those who move in these free and open spaces, as through different areas and domains of experience, the perspective broadens and the concept becomes more multifaceted. In many of our projects we work interdisciplinary with traffic planners, urban planners and architects, landscape architects, ecologists, as well as artists.
With the completion of the projects our work is not fully finished as it is our concern to continue to further accompany these by developing concepts for value-preserving maintenance, calculating lifecycle costs and planning the long-term maintenance management.
Potential influences of climate change, a change in mobility behaviour, and the preservation of biodiversity challenge open spaces. We consider and include these factors and plan accordingly to make free and open spaces available not only today but also in the future.

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The viewer is presented with an interpretation of a water feature, with rocky islands and bare trees. If the viewer allows himself to be receptive and open to the illusion, similar to when looking at a landscape painting, the indisputably fictional outdoor space becomes a true experience.

The light gray landscape is sober and tranquil, it invites the viewer to stare at the depths and disappear into a moment of reflection, introspection, such as one might experience when staring at the sea, or a mountain valley. It is no coincidence that this work, which stands exactly where previously the abbey church once was, has a spiritual dimension. The artist conceived this silent space as a place for meditation, entirely in line with the original purpose of an abbey.

Following the installation of ‘Location (5)’ in the Towada Art Center in Japan, this is Op de Beeck’s second monumental perception-oriented artwork to be given a permanent home.

Location: Herkenrode, Hasselt, BE

© All images by Hans Op de Beeck

Hans Op de Beeck produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. He regards man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Above all, Op de Beeck is keen to stimulate the viewers’ senses, and invite them to really experience the image. He seeks to create a form of visual fiction that delivers a moment of wonder and silence.

Over the past twenty years Op de Beeck realized numerous monumental ‘sensorial’ installations, in which he evoked what he describes as ‘visual fictions’: tactile deserted spaces as an empty set for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. In many of his films though, in contrast with those depopulated spaces, he prominently depicts anonymous characters.

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In religious cosmology, the sky was conceptualized as a physical structure – a firmament – that separated earth from the oceans of heavens. Firmament Arch references the architecture of our increasingly necessary biodomes and greenhouses and reimagines them as the firmament structures of tomorrow. The curved backbone of the work houses a network of tanks, tubes, pumps, and nozzles that form an aeroponic growing environment, allowing plants to grow in irregular and confined spaces with minimal water waste or reliance on natural light.

© Images from Eric Rannestad
Completed with the Clowes Fund Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. April 2019.

Eric Rannestad (b. 1996, Connecticut) is a Washington based artist making work about the built environment and the systems humans use to compartmentalize the natural world. Eric received his BA in Art and Economics from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He has attended fellowships and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, North Cascades Institute, New York Arts Practicum, and Shell House Residency. His research in environmental economics is critical to his art practice and Eric’s ongoing work for environmental and conservation groups is a strong influence in his work.

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© All images by Atelier Cristina Ataíde

The project was carried out under the POLDRA Public Sculpture Project Viseu, which has as its creator and promoter the visual artist João Dias.
Year: 2018
Place: Mata do Fontelo, Viseu, Portugal | 40.6580970. – 7.9015820
Media: Tether strap, paint and metal
Dimensions: 1.300 m (variable; the full length of the tether strap)

Cristina Ataíde is a visual artist. She lives and works in Lisbon. She is Graduate in Sculpture and has a Master’s degree in Sculpture, by the Superior School of Fine Arts of the Lisbon University, where she also attended the course of Design Studies. She was an Invited Teacher at Lusofona University, in Lisbon between 1997 and 2012.
Her work, most of the time is done during the artist’s travelling, transits between sculpture and drawing, going through photography and video.
The concerns about nature are one of the most constant worries in her work. Going through different landscapes and around the world, trying to understand its questions. The denounce of ecological crimes, the preservation of nature, and in her last years, the problematics about the refugees, are always going around her personal and artistic preoccupations. The migration problematic, for instance, it is possible to see in her NO NAME installations, present at the travelling exhibition in Rome, Madrid, France, Brno, and this year will be at Biennale Baku, Azerbaijan.
Cristina Ataíde has enrolled in different artist residencies, for example Ethiopia Walkscapes, Hangar Residence, 2017; Winter Workspace Program, Glyndor Gallery Wave Hill, NYC, USA, 2014; Verflixt und Zugenauht, Wittenberge, Germany, 2014, etc…
Her work is represented in different public and private collections in Portugal and abroad.

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The project area was given as an extension of the gardens located at the center of AGU Student Guest Houses that is registered under an Industrial Heritage; A story which was designed as a product of a dynamic and variable process, ACHROME[scape] reveals the natural power of concrete and invites us to rethink the underestimated hidden beauty of concrete.

Achrome describes an empty space with non-linear and colorless. The color of the Achrome is nature and the material is concrete. In Latin, “morphê” stands for “form” and ”genesis” means “formation”.

Within the “morphogenesis” approach at the Achrome[scape] design, the form is rather than a final result of the format variables of the dynamic process products which form complexes in the form of individual cells. Cell and nature are components of a common dynamic process.

The formation process of the design involves a holistic diversification from micro-macro to different-scale material types and to the settlement organization of units. A total of 158 units, all of which are made of a single white cell concrete, are based on various forms of the formation to make the boundaries pass across. To create a design that was dissolved in the soil, which was born out of the soil and approached to the smoothness of the sky, the material was transformed into the art of existence by using thinner aggregated concrete.

All images by MAA Melike Altınışık Architects.

Location/Year: Kayseri, Turkey | 2018
Area: 50m2
Project Director: Melike Altınışık
Project Asist.Director: Begüm Aktaş
Project Team: Sevgi Altun, Emre Çalışkan, Eda Gürhan, Bekir Ülker
Organisation: Betonart Summer School
Curator: Deniz Aslan, Nursen Gümüşsoy

MAA Melike Altınışık Architects is a leading international architecture practice that is dedicated to develop innovative and visionary projects that ranges from architecture and urban design to interiors as well as installations and product design. The award winning architectural design studio founded in Istanbul in 2013 by Melike Altınışık, draws inspiration from a wide range of sources not traditionally associated with architecture, such as organic and natural systems.

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Another Green World addresses a common sense of alienation from the natural world, exploring and challenging our assumptions that we know and have conquered the landscape. It is about discovering something unidentified and peculiar; revisiting the possibilities of early explorers and trying to experience the landscape with an open-mindedness wrought from the potential to find something new and unexpected, to recapture the excitement and awe of the pioneers, botanists, scientists and naturalists to whom all possibilities were open.

Using shapes inspired by insect eggs, shells, oceanic diatoms, sea anemones and corals, each ‘form’ is made from materials drawn from the surrounding area — like the cadis fly lava that builds an armoured case to protect and house itself — these forms are disguised or distinguished using seaweeds, river weed, moss, mares tail, bracken, heather, lichen, chalk dust and leaf litter.

© All images by Ellie Davies (2013)

Ellie Davies (Born 1976) lives in Dorset and works in the woods and forests of Southern England.  She gained her MA in Photography from London College of Communication in 2008.

Davies is represented by Crane Kalman Brighton Gallery in the UK, Patricia Armocida Gallery in Milan, Susan Spiritus Gallery in California, A.Galerie in Paris and Brussels and Brucie Collections in Kiev.

Davies recently launched her newest series ‘Fires, 2018’.  Fires 2 has been selected Winner of the Urbanautica Institute Awards 2018: Nature, Environment and Perspectives. The Fires series was also voted Winner of the 12^th Julia Margaret Cameron Award: Professional Landscapes and Seascapes category and the 12^th Pollux Awards: Professional Fine Art Series Winner.  There will be an Award Winner’s Exhibition for both competitions at Galerie Valid Foto in Barclona in early May 2019. The Fires series is featured in Dodho Magazine Issue 7 and Rakes Progress, Issue 10 (forthcoming).

I have been working in UK forests for the past nine years, making work which explores the complex interrelationship between the landscape and the individual. Our understanding of landscape can be seen as a construction in which layers of meaning that reflect our own cultural preoccupations and anxieties obscure the reality of the land, veiling it, and transforming the natural world into an idealisation.

UK forests have been shaped by human processes over thousands of years and include ancient woodlands, timber forestry, wildlife reserves and protected Areas of Outstanding Natural. As such, the forest represents the confluence of nature, culture, and human activity. Forests are potent symbols in folklore, fairy tale and myth, places of enchantment and magic as well as of danger and mystery. In more recent history they have come to be associated with psychological states relating to the unconscious.

Against this backdrop my work explores the ways in which identity is formed by the landscapes we live and grow up in. Making a variety of temporary and non-invasive interventions in the forest, my work places the viewer in the gap between reality and fantasy, creating spaces which encourage the viewer to re-evaluate the way in which their own relationship with the landscape is formed, the extent to which it is a product of cultural heritage or personal experience, and how this has been instrumental in their own identity.

Throughout my practice small acts of engagement respond to the landscape using a variety of strategies, such as making and building, creating pools of light, suspending smoke within the space, or using craft materials such as paint and pigment. The final images are the culmination of these interventions. The forest becomes a studio, forming a backdrop to contextualize the work, so that each piece draws on its location, a golden tree introduced into a thicket shimmers in the darkness, painted paths snake through the undergrowth, and strands of wool are woven between trees mirroring colours and formal elements within the space.

These altered landscapes operate on a number of levels. They are a reflection of my personal relationship with the forest, a meditation on universal themes relating to the psyche and call into question the concept of landscape as a social and cultural construct. Most importantly they draw the viewer into the forest space, asking the them to consider how their own identity is shaped by the landscapes they live in.

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This table has just appeared in the middle of the open garden and quickly started to lead people to seat on the chairs. You can climb up the ladders, sit down, and watch the surrounding landscape — a time for a deep communication with the landscape, the environment, and the world. It elevates your gaze a little higher than normal, and this small difference gives you a fresh perspective. This is a new experience of the world — small changes in the point of view that also produce small changes in your world.

Thus, having a rich variety of perceptions makes your world richer and beautiful.

All images by Hidemi Nishida

Hidemi Nishida was born in Otaru city in Hokkaido in 1986. He studied Design in Sapporo and obtained a Masters of Fine Art at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway. His architectural background brings together functional making with an interest in intimate transformations of our environment. Nishida questions our milieu, deconstructing and adapting existing structures or materials or even whole landscapes in order to refresh our view of the world. His structures create a presence but are also ephemeral, often using reclaimed or found materials to create a bricolage of references to place, time and memory.

His interests also include the archive of the memory of specific places, its past significance and the accumulation of personal memories of people. He has recently archived 50sqm of ground on the site of a decommissioned railway, which was used to transport coal, scanning the whole area with a simple A4 scanner. This creates archival material depending on each situation, with the use of different methods such as photography, video and sound. Nishida also engaged in the social activity for cultivating individual’s perception to be aware of the beautiful detail of the world. He often makes a gathering, talk session, lecture to share and exchange various ideas to experience the world with others.

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The intention is to request a more personal response to the landscape, an experience embedded in memory, history, storytelling, folk law and magic, to engage the viewer in a dialogue with the image and in a sense of the familiar, drawing on an awareness of how our perceptions of the natural world are shaped. Ongoing debates surrounding landscape examine the consequences of conceiving of landscape as beautiful. These constructions obscure the reality of the land, veiling it, transforming the natural world into an idealization. The trees in the Smoke and Mirrors Heathland series allude to this construction, whilst also evoking a sense of the fairytale. These fantasy trees reference these fictions which persist in spite of any conscious knowledge about the material, social or political status of landscapes, to create ‘rural myth’ and romanticism, obscuring an understanding of the land as threatened and exploited, dangerous and unknown.

© All images by Ellie Davies (2013)

Ellie Davies (Born 1976) lives in Dorset and works in the woods and forests of Southern England.  She gained her MA in Photography from London College of Communication in 2008.

Davies is represented by Crane Kalman Brighton Gallery in the UK, Patricia Armocida Gallery in Milan, Susan Spiritus Gallery in California, A.Galerie in Paris and Brussels and Brucie Collections in Kiev.

Davies recently launched her newest series ‘Fires, 2018’.  Fires 2 has been selected Winner of the Urbanautica Institute Awards 2018: Nature, Environment and Perspectives. The Fires series was also voted Winner of the 12^th Julia Margaret Cameron Award: Professional Landscapes and Seascapes category and the 12^th Pollux Awards: Professional Fine Art Series Winner.   There will be an Award Winner’s Exhibition for both competitions at Galerie Valid Foto in Barclona in early May 2019.The Fires series is featured in Dodho Magazine Issue 7 and Rakes Progress, Issue 10 (forthcoming).

I have been working in UK forests for the past nine years, making work which explores the complex interrelationship between the landscape and the individual. Our understanding of landscape can be seen as a construction in which layers of meaning that reflect our own cultural preoccupations and anxieties obscure the reality of the land, veiling it, and transforming the natural world into an idealisation.

UK forests have been shaped by human processes over thousands of years and include ancient woodlands, timber forestry, wildlife reserves and protected Areas of Outstanding Natural. As such, the forest represents the confluence of nature, culture, and human activity. Forests are potent symbols in folklore, fairy tale and myth, places of enchantment and magic as well as of danger and mystery. In more recent history they have come to be associated with psychological states relating to the unconscious.

Against this backdrop my work explores the ways in which identity is formed by the landscapes we live and grow up in. Making a variety of temporary and non-invasive interventions in the forest, my work places the viewer in the gap between reality and fantasy, creating spaces which encourage the viewer to re-evaluate the way in which their own relationship with the landscape is formed, the extent to which it is a product of cultural heritage or personal experience, and how this has been instrumental in their own identity.

Throughout my practice small acts of engagement respond to the landscape using a variety of strategies, such as making and building, creating pools of light, suspending smoke within the space, or using craft materials such as paint and pigment. The final images are the culmination of these interventions. The forest becomes a studio, forming a backdrop to contextualize the work, so that each piece draws on its location, a golden tree introduced into a thicket shimmers in the darkness, painted paths snake through the undergrowth, and strands of wool are woven between trees mirroring colours and formal elements within the space.

These altered landscapes operate on a number of levels. They are a reflection of my personal relationship with the forest, a meditation on universal themes relating to the psyche and call into question the concept of landscape as a social and cultural construct. Most importantly they draw the viewer into the forest space, asking the them to consider how their own identity is shaped by the landscapes they live in.

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