Taking Ground

In the fall of 2019, I spent two months in the field questioning the impulse of land art and finding that the earthworks, and the desire to create them, are part of colonialism’s fabricated terrain. I visited eighteen sites in five states, and it was through the rapid pace of this research that I began collecting dirt to ground myself in place—to create a connection to the unfamiliar, to record time, and to note evidence of each site’s difference. By taking the dirt from already disturbed places, paths and other sites of previous human interruption, I was taking material that was not mine, while wanting to believe it belonged to no one. This experience has led me to focus on the verb take and its connection to the land, questioning what other practices were driven by the same impulse.