Tag: art

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Armando Guadalupe Cortés: ¿Y LA GENTE?

Cortez performing El Descanso En La Gloria, (Rest when I am Dead), 2017

Armando Guadalupe Cortés was born in Urequío, Michoacán, México and raised in Wilmington, California. He graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art 2021 and a BA from UCLA in 2012 .  ¿Y LA GENTE? from 2020, blends sculpture and performance to explore themes of memory, myth, history, geography, experience and materiality. 

Rammed Earth Columns before the performance

¿Y LA GENTE? (And the People?)
2020
Installation and performance
Clay, earth, iron oxides, stoneware
Each pillar 64” x 24” x 24”

Film still of the performance at ASU Art Museum, 2020

During the performance of ¿Y LA GENTE? Cortes excavates the rammed earth columns surrounded by musicians and dancers of his native Mexican heritage. Once revealing a gold ceramic sculpture within each column, one resembling a nopal cactus and the other a milling stone, Cortes exits the gallery leaving the deconstructed pillars to remain for the rest of the exhibition.  

Revealed Nopal Cactus
Revealed milling stone

Through blending performance and sculpture, he is able to question the dichotomy between myth and fiction as an antonym to history. Growing up in two worlds has lead Cortés to a fantastical take on the ordinary. He incorporates the multitude of symbols and identities from his family of farmers, migrants, manufacturers, office professionals, and professors in his material palette and choice of dress. In contrasting the mythical or in this case the colorful and culturally rich materiality with his business casual clothing, he illustrates the parallelism and tension within his life and work. This re-assembling of materials and cultural symbolism is crucial to how Cortes seeks to challenging notions of spectacle and viewership.

Sources:

Artist Website: https://armandogcortes.com/Y-LA-GENTE-2020

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/402306364?fl=pl&fe=cm

Bemis Center: https://www.bemiscenter.org/residents/armando_guadalupe_cort%C3%A9s

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Trina Michelle Robinson: Open Your Eyes to Water

Trina Michelle Robinson is an artist from Oak Park, Illinois who is currently working in San Francisco. Her art originates from from personal and historical archives, reflecting on her own ancestry to create immersive and deeply personal spatial encounters that materialize the complexity of emotions and layered geographies of Black migration. Her works often begin by tracing the steps of her ancestors, gathering materials from their homes and homelands, using this tactile act as a means to connect with them and gather their fractured and lost memories. In particular, she often collects dirt from these sites of personal significance, transforming that earth into a charged object within her compositions. Her installations are undefinable, hovering somewhere between an altar, a model, or a garden; a collection of objects that become spatial poetry. Trina received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2022.

Her work Open Your Eyes to Water was exhibited in San Francisco at the 500 Cap Street Foundation and at Root Division from February-May 2026. The work is an expanded version of her previous installation titled Elegy for Nancy (2022) – a tender tribute to her oldest known ancestor, a woman named Nancy who was born in 1770s Kentucky, then still part of Virginia. Open Your Eyes to Water is a living installation tracing her years-long cross-continental engagement with family lineage and movement from Senegal, to Kentucky, Chicago, and California.

 

The Installation merges with the atmosphere of the gallery, charging the space with a melancholic yet restorative energy. At the center, a rammed earth block holds the room with a potent presence, atop which sits a reproduction of a will from the previous owner of her enslaved ancestors, written with handmade ink (a mixture of soil collected from Senegal and charred cedar charcoal) on paper she fabricated from cotton picked at a farm her ancestor used to be enslaved at in Oklahoma. Every mention of her ancestor’s enslavement has been redacted with sewn lines of sisal thread from Zimbabwe, reclaiming this history for herself, freeing her ancestors, speaking for them in the present moment.

The rammed earth block is composed from various soil samples from significant places tracing her family history through time and space, compressed together into a unified block, supporting a document of their liberation. The block sits in an analogous landscape of dirt and grass plumes, harkening to the various landscapes natural, agricultural, and urban landscapes her ancestors have traversed across the world.

 

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Andy Goldworthy’s Clay Wall

Above: Andy Goldsworthy, ‘Red Wall’, 2025.

Andy Goldsworthy is artist known for his work with nature and ephemeral materials such as rock, wood, leaves, snow, ice, and clay, and the site specificity of his pieces. He arranges them in a way that is just beyond the realm of possibility, investigating the line between the natural and artificial.

In 1992, he covered the floor of a London gallery in clay. In 1996 he made the same work at Haines Gallery in San Francisco, but against a 14′ x 17′ wall. The work was made knowing the clay would crack, and not knowing whether the clay would stay attached, but it surprisingly stayed attached for many years, despite occasional earthquakes. This was the beginning of a line of inquiry of clay, creating works with things embedded in clay, experimenting with intentional drying and cracking,

“… to make change an integral part of a work’s purpose so that, if anything, it becomes stronger and more complete as it falls apart and disappears.

“Clay can be well-behaved and easy to work. Yet it has such a powerful impact on the landscape: it reveals its more unpredictable qualities as it dries, and this process interests me most.”

Andy Goldsworthy, Clay Wall, Haines Gallery, 1996.

Andy Goldsworthy, Clay Wall, Ingleby Gallery, 1998.

 

 

Above: Drawn Stone is piece commissioned by the De Young in 2005. It is a continuous crack running north from the edge of the Music Concourse roadway in front of the museum up to the main entrance door, inspired by California’s tectonics.

Video: Andy Goldsworthy’s Earth Wall, Presidio of San Francisco, 2014.

Video: Andy Goldsworthy Studio Visit, Tate, 2011.

A life’s artwork: 50 years of Andy Goldsworthy, BBC, 2025.

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Andy Goldsworthy

Review: In 'Leaning Into the Wind — Andy Goldsworthy,' an Artist Grapples (Again) With Time - The New York Times

The artist Andy Goldsworthy in “Leaning Into the Wind.” Credit:Thomas Riedelscheimer/Magnolia Pictures

Andy Goldsworthy is an international based artist born in England.  His art process is known for integrating and creating with the natural environment. Working as both sculptor and photographer, Goldsworthy crafts his installations out of rocks, ice, leaves, or branches, cognizant that the landscape will change, then carefully documents the ephemeral collaborations with nature through photography.

Andy Goldsworthy’s installation Tree Fall

Andy Goldsworthy, “Tree Fall“, 2013

Goldsworthy has numerous art installation and creations.  However, his art installation, Earth Wall, utilizes rammed earth and eucalyptus branches to illustrate simulated layers of earthen materials as an art form and not as a structural material.

Andy Goldsworthy with an installation in San Francisco, tentatively titled Earth Wall. Photograph by The Chronicle's Sam Whiting.Andy Goldsworthy, Earth Wall, 2014, Photograph by The Chronicle’s Sam Whiting. 

In order to construct this installation Goldsworthy and his team collected curved eucalyptus branches from San Francisco’s Presidio. Then they installed a sphere of branches onto a wall before the formwork for the rammed earth wall is installed.

Eucalyptus branches from the Presidio installed before the formwork for the rammed earth wall is installed.

After which, a shutter formwork was constructed in front of the wall. Then locally sourced Presidio earth mixed is poured into the forms, and ramming begins. Rammers carefully compact earth around the twisted ball of  Eucalyptus branches. Once poured, the formwork is removed revealing a freshly packed rammed earth wall and the center point of the ball of gnarled eucalyptus branches.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy poses with the installation before beginning to dig out the earth surrounding the encased eucalyptus wood.

Once hardened, Goldsworthy excavates the rammed earth from around the gnarled eucalyptus wood.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy excavates the rammed earth from around the gnarled eucalyptus wood.

For a more detailed visualization view this video. 

Andy Goldsworthy continues exploring the relationship between art and the natural environment. His ability to become attuned to his environment mentally, physically, and emotionally, creates a unique perspective of the human  and natural world.

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”

– Andy Goldsworthy

A family walking near Andy Goldsworthy’s Wood Line, with a bicycle in the foreground.

Andy Goldsworthy, “Wood Line“, 2011, Photograph by  Brian Vahey.

 

References:

 

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Iggy Azalea

Australian rap star Iggy Azalea grew up in a house that her father built by hand from mud bricks, surrounded by 5 hectares of land. She reminisces about it in her song Work:

You can hate it or love it
Hustle and the struggle is the only thing I’m trusting
Thorough bread in a mud brick before the budget
White chick on that Pac shit
My passion was ironic
And my dreams were uncommon

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Radioactive Earth

These food storage jars were made of radioactive earth from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster area in Japan. They were designed by Royal College of Art graduate student Hilda Hellström who contacted the last person still living inside the evacuation zone, Naoto Matsumura, and collected soil from his rice fields that can’t be farmed due to contamination.


[ More at Dezeen ]

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THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN / rammed earth at the BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2012

There is nothing new under the sun is an installation comprised of rammed earth and created for the 2012 Venice Biennial. The installation was done within the collateral event, “Traces of Century and Future Steps”, organised and curated by artist Rene Rietmeyer (head of the Global Art Affairs Foundation) and hosted at the Palazzo Bembo just next to the Rialto bridge. The architects Estudio Altiplano, from Bogota, Colombia, were given a space at the fourth floor of a 15th century palace to install the work—a performance piece that consisted of hoisting 3.5 tons of earth into the small chamber then compacting it into a solid rammed earth object. The work engaged many participants, simultaneously a demonstration in the process of fabricating allowing a discussion to emerge about topics of tradition, contemporaneity, territory and the built environment.

The installation formally suggests to the observer how architecture depends on matter in the form of territory, energy and resources. Earth was used to demonstrate how earth is a basic building material used all over the world and that traditional building techinques necessarily depend on oral tradition or transformation of knowledge to evolve and survive. Additionally, the use of earth demonstrated the plastic notion that conjures the act of subtracting compacted earth from the ground to mold it into new shapes without interfering in its material capacities. A continued discussion surrounding the project continues at http://www.rammedweb.com/

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Alderney Stones

A new site-specific installation of works by Andy Goldsworthy opened on the island of Alderney, located in the Bailiwick of Guernsey in the English Channel Islands. Alderney Stones consists of an installation of 11 boulders spread across the landscape of Alderney.

Goldsworthy formed each 3-ton boulder from a mold of rammed earth and other materials sourced from the island, such as berries, seeds, old tools and discarded gloves.

Set in varying degrees of exposure to the elements, the stones will eventually erode, revealing the elements concealed inside, and ultimately return to the land from which they came.

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Tidal Resonance Chamber


Image: © Robert Horner

As the first rammed-earth construct in the City of Tacoma, The Tidal Resonance Chamber provides a contemplative and relaxation space for users of the Center for Urban Waters (a LEED Platinum Marine research and analysis facility) . Aimed at serving as an instrument for perceptual synchronize with the natural rhythms of Commencement Bay, the chamber’s thick insulated earthen walls buffer out the heavy industrial sounds of the surrounding Port of Tacoma, and through a series of feed back pump operations the chamber’s water level mirrors that of the Thea Foss Waterway manifesting as a ratio-reduction.


Image: © Robert Horner

Designed by Robert Horner, the Tidal Resonance Chamber’s main interior space has a trapezoidal footprint roughly 12’ x 18’. The fortified rammed-earth walls measure 8’6” in height, and rest atop a concrete foundation that measures 4’ in height. The chamber has a maximum filling capacity of 2500 gallons, which will fill at the highest of high tides. The interior of the chamber is filled with reclaimed granite curb fragments, river stones and will eventually populate with micro-organisms, barnacles and other aquatic lifeforms.