From high in the sky over Cappadocia Susan Moore looks down at part of the largest contemporary land art project in the world
There are few artists whose work is best seen by hot-air balloon. There are even fewer whose works can only be photographed in their entirety by satellite. To describe the Australian Andrew Rogers as a land artist on an epic scale seems something of an understatement. Over the past 13 years he has masterminded the construction of 47 monumental structures in 13 countries spanning seven continents and involving some 6,700 people.
The more remote a site, the better it suits his purpose. Rogers has a penchant for wilderness, desert and plateau, favouring culturally resonant sites that are often barely accessible, and not flinching from challenging extremes of climate. His first structure negotiated the 40-degree temperatures of the Arava Desert in Israel, 400m below sea level; his fourth, the oxygen-thin altitudes of a Bolivian plain at a height of 4,500m. One of his last was an unusually ephemeral installation confected of ash, ferried to site by sled, on an ice lake in Antarctica. All are part of a still ongoing global Rhythms of Life project which, as one might expect, is the largest contemporary land art undertaking in the world.
Rogers’s structures are essentially one of two things. Some are monumental geoglyphs — effectively linear emblems ‘drawn’ on to virgin landscape by the placing or piling of stones. The others are vast monoliths formed by stacking cut stones or by arrangements of single, rough-hewn columns. While one type is low-lying and hugs the landscape, the second dominates it.
The scale and range of this project is unprecedented — though not unparalleled — in the modern world.
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