Artists, Land, Nature

For the past four decades, an increasingly important trend in contemporary art has established itself that of artists who have embraced the context and inspiration offered by nature, though in a spirit distinctly different from traditional landscape painting. Artists, Land, Nature showcases the work of five important contemporary artists who work in the landscape and make use of the materials and processes of nature in their art. Their methods favor observation, collecting, and forms of manipulation that are more reflective than assertive, resulting in beautiful, sometimes ephemeral, work.Chris Drury, herman de vries, Nikolaus Lang, Richard Long, and Giuseppe Penone do not belong to a particular school, but they are united by their empathy for nature and their decision to work outside the urban contexts of much modernist art. Interviews with the artists, conducted by William Furlong, reveal both widely differing motivation in their approaches to their work and striking similarities in their underlying concerns, and, sometimes, in their working methods. The introductory essay by Mel Gooding places these artists in both historical and contemporary contexts, as well as discussing other artists, including Roger Ackling, Sjoerd Buisman, Susan Derges, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy, Peter Hutchinson, and David Nash.