Michelle Stuart

Four works from Stuart’s series Area-Sayreville, New Jersey (1976) are comprised of paper rubbed with earth from the quarry and framed with a row of photographs from the site. The artist’s incorporation of photography, beginning in the 1960s, is one of the earliest demonstrations of photography in Land Art.

The grid is a recurring formal structure of Stuart’s work, synonymous with the cool detachment of Conceptual Art of the 1960s. However, the rationality imposed by the grid is exceeded by the natural elements contained within. Stuart arranges the components in the same way one would work with line, shape, and form, creating a unified composition but with depth that moves the viewers’ eyes back and forth, as demonstrated in the early work El Florido Chart (1980) and a recent photographic work Creation Myth (2020).

Collapsing time, memory and place, Stuart’s work addresses the metaphysical while remaining profoundly rooted in its own materiality and the artist’s interest in archeology, botany and history. Armed with the curiosity of an Enlightenment explorer, she approaches materials from the earth and nature as a collector and archivist, aiming to contain their energetic potential as well as to underscore their fragility as beacons of the dire environmental crisis we currently face.