The Proposal

A line of Egyptians, clad in white galabayyas blowing in the wind, intently follows a thin, sinuous line of dyed red sand by the pyramids in Giza.

A hundred strands of rope made of braided grass hang taut from tree to tree creating a wall across a moor in North Yorkshire. Villagers cannot see to the other side.

Lichens color the snow, creating outstanding colors against the stark white polar ice landscape. I dig a trench in the snow and fill it with colored lichens.

Land art is a form of art that began in the late 1960s and uses natural resources, such as leaves, rocks, and soil as a medium. Much of land art, often referred to as earthworks, has been a response to environmental activism in hopes to create ecological awareness. I, however, will create land art as a tool to heighten spatial awareness.

With the Zeff Fellowship, I will travel to areas of extreme and exceptional environments, from rainforests and sand deserts to moors and glacial deserts, to sculpt and create lines in the earth using indigenous, natural materials as a medium to explore the simple gesture of the line. My decision to center my land art on the concept of a line is designed to allow me to experiment with how people of various cultures respond to an interruption in their physical environment in a very specific way.


Humans use lines everyday to guide and inhibit movement, from the lines on our roads to the imaginary borders between countries. A line is not just a mark. It is one of the most fundamental one-dimensional signs. A line can serve as a boundary, a wall, or even a path to follow, leading to a place or functioning as a sign of where someone has already been. It appears directed, in motion, and in a process of development. A line can curve, be built up, or even dug up out of the earth. It can be a difference in color, a difference in texture, or a difference in feeling.

What, though, psychologically constitutes a line that functions as a border, a wall? In what shape, size, form, or fashion must a line be until it is followed? Does this vary from culture to culture? Does the environment around the sculpted lines I create have an impact on how people react? If I take one sculpture and idea and create it in two different locations, how will people respond differently? Will they respond at all? These are all questions I hope to explore and answer as I spend my year creating various site-specific installations. In order to capture and study the ways in which people respond to the physical spaces I restructure, I will film the responses of people before and after the pieces have been installed. Along the way, I hope to discover the distinct relationships between people, their culture, their natural environment, and the ways in which they perceive the physical world.

By changing, displacing, sculpting, and interrupting, if even just for a moment in time, the natural environment, I also desire to bring people to grow more aware of what is around them, not simply physically, but also psychologically. Rather than presenting the viewer with a representative or monumental figure, the purpose of my environmental sculpture will be to alter the viewers’ perceptions of their environment by involving them rather than merely facing them. I hope to bring people to experience a place rather than to simply occupy a space.

My choice to use natural and indigenous resources stems from practical as well as aesthetic reasons. While natural materials are accessible, they will also allow me to work more closely with the environment. In this way, I can study the aesthetics of the natural world. Artists and architects have consistently used nature as a source of inspiration throughout history. Da Vinci used proportions based on the golden ratio, proportions found everywhere in nature from the shell of a snail to the length of the bones in our fingers, while architects, such as Antoni Gaudi and Santiago Calatrava, have applied many of nature’s amorphous forms in their buildings.

I am intentionally leaving my ideas and concepts for projects unresolved to allow the materials and places to dictate how they “want” to be used, not to mention the most crucial inspiration, being the people, culture, and land, with which I will engage. This is key to the concept of creating site-specific pieces in reaction to people and places. I will, however, be continually conducting further research before my journey on the geography, culture, and people of all the countries I plan to visit during my Zeff year, brainstorming visions of land art along the way.

The Zeff Fellowship allows me to take my visions and make them real. This unique opportunity will allow me to create land art—to make lines in the earth with natural, indigenous materials—in exceptional environments that will enrich my exploration into how people from diverse cultures respond and interact with their physical surroundings. By doing this I will foster new perspectives as an artist and an understanding of and sensitivity to spatial perceptions, various natural environments, and the people who inhabit them, so that in the future I will build structures that do not simply stand but are—in every sense of the word—experienced.

Essentially, I’ll be living out a dream in the next year…making art…traveling…seeing the world. :)

Thank you to Dr. Stephen Zeff for this amazing gift and to Rice University. And of course, to my family, friends, and mentors for all your support, help, guidance, and interest in the work I do!