Answering Earth
Canacadea Creek Rundown (Cairn I)
Digital print,
Wooden shelf containing relics from site and fused cairns.
Sam Horowitz
Canacadea Creek Rundown (Cairn I) is part of an ongoing project using the language of human-stacked stones to mark space. To create this work, I used rocks I collected from a local creek to assemble a cairn in a kiln, and thermally fused the stack together. By using only these stones and the high-heat of a ceramic kiln, the materials making up the work remain physically close to their natural forms; brought to temperatures similar to those found twenty-nine miles below the surface of the Earth, but without that extreme pressure. In fusing each cairn, I apply geologic-esque forces to geologic materials, changing the state of the rocks from sedimentary mudrock to something new, half-metamorphosed into chemical compositions stronger and stranger than before. I returned the cairn to the creek and photographed it within a landscape heavily modified—perhaps entirely created—by direct human action; the creek meanders through the site of a construction dump.
'Answering Earth' archives 15 artworks displayed in the virtual exhibition Answering Earth— organized by Rural Midwest Artist Collective, with guest juror Jason Brown (@miningthelandscape). The exhibition called for any media concerned with the subject of land-use.
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