Robert Smithson wrote, “The strata of the earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order and social structures which confine art.” (*) He understood the desert as both a material reality and a conceptual condition, a place where “the desert… is less nature than a concept, a place that swallows up boundaries.” (*) His language sharpens the image of the artist there, stripped down, dried out, the mind cleared of urban residue until only the essential remains. The desert burns away the unnecessary, leaving the stark fact of one’s own existence in the reflection of its silence.

For five years, I lived in the Sonoran desert. The harshness forces the awareness of mortality: [and an idea of immortality]. It is a place for self-reflection, introspection, observation, and silence. We go to the desert to learn to see, to feel, to strip bare our identities to the fundamentals, to the place of silence where observation is keen and focused. The desert’s bareness can be metaphorically seen as post-apocalyptic, a field where the individual is set in opposition to an armored ecology of rattlesnakes, scorpions, and thorned plants. It offers a vast landscape for viewing the human as a solitary figure, exposed to the elements and time.

Smithson observed that “the ground becomes a map,” (*) a mutable surface that registers both physical and conceptual shifts. For decades, land art has taken root in these barren regions, its forms etched into horizons of stone and sand. This was the right terrain for its time, an uncompromising stage for the scale and isolation those works demanded. Yet my present direction moves toward a different ground, one not stripped of life but saturated with it.

The vegetation of New England wraps perception and experience in abundance, resilience, and cycles of renewal. Here, trees and grasses and wildlife live freely, the air is heavy with water, and the ebb and flow of human life is inseparable from the rivers, wetlands, and root systems that knit it together. The saturated landscape offers a seemingly less oppressive perspective than the desert. Rather than isolating the individual, it presses us to understand our proximity to nature and the biome that allows all biological life to exist and evolve. Perhaps it is this lush environment that allows us to embrace ourselves and our culture and each other.

But the Eastern climate holds a desert likeness too; in the seasons of frozen ground, leafless trees, and grey skies. Each year we experience an entire cycle: from germination, to a living canopy, to harvest, and dormancy; only to repeat again.

Every pulse of life-blood is in communion with this landscape. The installations I envision here, built from glass, water, light, metal, stone, and plantings, will be instruments for perception and contemplation, embedded in an environment of water and ice, attuned to the flows and structures that sustain life.

For decades I have operated within a system of liquid maps, embracing the concept that maps are alive, crossing over and passing through the conditions of geolocation and memory, geopolitical control, shifting times, and organic visual marking of histories; an articulation of topographies like the songlines of the Australian Aborigines, ever fluid. Smithson’s strata and my liquid maps share a recognition: the ground itself is a living record, layered with material and memory, shifting under the pressures of time, water, and human presence. It is here, in this lush terrain, that I will inscribe new coordinates for seeing and for locating ourselves within the embedded systems and quantum fields that hold us.

David Teeple
2025

(*) Robert Smithson
The Collected Writings
Edited by Jack Flam

16 Cuboid Float, 2017, Glass, water, aluminum, steel, sunlight, and bio-matter, 276” x 96” x 72”