Lecture 5. - 4th March - Land Art, Earth Art and Environmental Art

In this lecture we were intorduced to the art movement known as Land Art, Earth Art and Environmental Art. We looked at how the body interacts with these art forms and one aspect of it is that the public can only really see these art forms from the air, and many people do not have access to this mode of transport and cannot really appreciate these works unless they see photographs of them which may not be as effective or may not impact the viewer as much as if it was seen in the real setting. I think this lecture was a real eye opener, I had heard of Land Art before and only really related it to the works of Andy Goldsworthy and his ethermeral pieces, where as in this lecture I saw how Lancelot "Capability" Brown was called an artist of the land because he change lanscapes to make them "more natural", which I didnt think was classed as some sort of art form but it makes sense now, he was changing the landscape to make it maybe more beautiful, by creating view points in which to stand from and look at the view and to see the vast land below. We looked at a lot of different types of land art and the one that interested me most out of all of them I think are the Nazca Lines, in Peru, i thought it was amazing how they could only be seen from the sky and were straight lines and shapes all over this plateau. From this lecture I learnt that there is a lot more to Land Art than Andy Goldsworthy (even though i like his works). I'm not sure how Land Art could link to my work, maybe the straight lines of the Nazca Lines could be incorporated as lines of stitch in my work, i'm not really sure but it bears thinking about.