Environmental artists breaking new ground

As gardeners, we’ve all played our part in moulding and shaping the landscape, whether it’s something as modest as creating a gently raised bed or making furrows to plant potatoes. But imagine, for a moment, something on a vast and much more ambitious level, where soil is being used as a sculptural material to create wonderfully contoured, grass-covered swirls, dips, hollows, waves and spirals, and you have what is known as “land art” or “landforms”.

One of the best-known practitioners of this form of environmental art is the American-born landscape designer and "cultural theorist" Charles Jencks (charlesjencks.com), who helped design the intriguing landforms in the grounds of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. Situated in the parkland surrounding the gallery, the work takes the shape of a contoured, sinuous grassy mound reflected in three crescent shaped pools of water. The result is a manipulated landscape that manages to embrace nature and yet stand apart from it.

Jencks’s fascination with the use of landforms as a form of abstract environmental art is also evident in “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation”, his own famous 12-hectare garden in Dumfries in southwest Scotland, whose series of snaking, curling landforms and lakes are inspired by modern theories of cosmology and fractals (the many complex, never-ending patterns) found in nature.

Installation

Others known for their work with landforms include the American designer

Maya Yin Lin

. One of her best-known pieces is the “earth-wave” installation called

A Fold in the Field

, which Lin created for Gibbs Farm in

New Zealand

. Situated on a flat, grassy plain within sight of Kaipara harbour, it encompasses an area of 30,000sq m (323,000sq ft) and takes the form of a series of gently raised “folds” of grass-covered earth (the tallest is 11.5m) that billow gently across the field, echoing the waves of the nearby sea.

Yet another of Lin's celebrated landforms is Storm King Wavefield in Mountainville, New York, which the New York Times has described as "a puzzle to ponder – but also . . . a soul-soothing place of retreat". Again it takes the form of a series of 120m-long sculptural "waves" formed from just earth and grass, which echo the natural undulations of the surrounding wilder landscape including the Schunnemunk mountains. A committed environmentalist (along with her website mayalin.com, see whatismissing.org, the designer's haunting "global memorial to the planet"), the work is Lin's way of healing a landscape and topography scarred by its former use as a gravel pit.