I’m currently going through the process of looking at a lot of work - I tend to do this periodically, look up over the parapet and then see what other people are up to. Peter Hutchinson is someone I’ve been looking at recently
“My involvement with the natural order and impermanent intervention in that system has taken many forms. From land art works reaching from the heights of a volcano to the sea floor, I observed what was happening and what it signified to me. Lately, in collage landscapes, I have made environments that, though they don’t exist in nature, are idealised views. They range from the snow mountains of France, Switzerland and the Rockies to my own garden. In these I see patterns concerned with stretching time and place and which at the same time emulate my own experiences. Sometimes these ideas leap out of the visual into the verbal.
I feel also an almost desperate urge to recreate and record environments which are threatened and are disappearing.”
The idea of constructing idealised views I have a lot of sympathy for and find the techniques he uses intriguing. There certainly seems something about the art ‘object’ which is similar to what I’ve been trying for recently in my physically constructed (as opposed to digitally constructed) landscapes.
He currently has a book out ‘Thrown Rope’
Although Peter Hutchinson has been working with land art since the 1960s, he has yet to receive his proper due. A refreshingly modest artist, his delicate, fleeting work is extraordinarily beautiful, remarkable intelligent, and endlessly charming. Working in the vein of Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, Hutchinson’s works are ephemeral and subject to the whims of nature. Much of it is the product of his ‘thrown rope’ method - literally throwing ropes over an expanse of land, then placing lime or planting flowers along the lines determined by the ropes. The result is a snakelike garden or swerving lines of bleached land. Hutchinson has even thrown ropes underwater, planting flowers at the bottom of a lake or stringing oranges or onions beneath the water’s surface. The photographs in Thrown Rope document Hutchinson’s career, and are reproduced along with the artist’s own hand-written notes.
Here is a pdf catalogue of his ‘Progonosis Earth’ Landscape series. Note these are all unique works, no editions going on here.
