Anti-Monumentality and the Afterlives of ‘Land Art’ in Britain

Peat in Practice is a performance lecture composed from samples of sculptural research, art-historical and theoretical references, sited investigations and wider ecological perspectives. It was developed as part of a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship. Contemplating the work of artists who have both shaped and resisted the term ‘land art’, the performance lecture follows a trail of encounters with peatland materiality that shifts the sculptural frame. Supported by recent ecofeminist and regenerative thinking, the piece offers sculptural recipes whose essential ingredients are material compatibility, interspecies collaboration and deep time. What other ingredients might we gather for a contemporary form of land art that embodies cultural and ecological resilience?

An immersion in on-the-ground research informs the piece, including areas of the Great North Bog with the support of the Yorkshire Peat Partnership. Ongoing restoration at sites such as Fleet Moss in the Yorkshire Dales secure the future of these landscapes as carbon stores and uniquely rich habitats for biodiversity. Peat in Practice embraces the complexity of these landscapes of restoration, which are vessels for materials of varying degrees of compatibility. Far from being natural and undisturbed, these are essentially sculpted environments, continuously moulded by human and more-than-human communities. This provides fertile ground for a speculative, ‘wet’ land art that is not only situated but essentially collaborative, dynamic and unpredictable across a range of timescales.

Manon Awst is an artist based in Caernarfon who creates sculptures and site-specific artworks woven with ecological narratives. The ways in which materials transform locations and communities is at the forefront of her creative research. Her recent Future Wales Fellowship allowed her to delve deep into Welsh peatlands, and she presented Peaty Patterns at Earth Rising, IMMA Dublin and at the IUCN Peatland conference in the Cairngorms last year. She has been selected to lead the Wales in Venice project at the Biennale in 2026, in collaboration with artist Dylan Huw and partner institutions Oriel Davies and Oriel Myrddin.

Stephen Cripps’ Floating Fire Machine 1975 was a pyrotechnic sculpture conceived not as a monumental intervention but as an ephemeral, combustible event staged on the River Thames. Drawings and notes from his archive describe a burning machine – petrol-soaked rags, fireworks, coloured flames – set adrift just outside of his Butler’s Wharf studio. Though unrealised, the work’s materials and proposed location speak to a potent convergence of ecological degradation, industrial memory, and performative rupture.

Footage in Cripps’ archive of a boat burning near the exact location of his proposal suggests a deep engagement with the river as more than just a site – as both medium and witness. Declared biologically dead by the 1950s, the Thames in the 1970s still absorbed the toxic residues of empire and industry. In this context, Floating Fire Machine reads as an incendiary elegy. Fire and smoke mark a refusal of permanence, offering instead a gesture of spectacular disappearance within a landscape already scarred by extractive histories.

Trey Burns is an artist, writer and co-founder of Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, a non-profit project supporting experimental and site-responsive sculpture in Texas. His writing has appeared in Holt/Smithson Foundation, Nasher Magazine, Burnaway, Patron, and Southwest Contemporary. He served as moderator for the Nasher Graduate Symposium and wrote the keynote essay for the 2025 Nasher Prize Compendium on artist Otobong Nkanga. Sweet Pass has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, TACA, and the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, among others. Burns is a lecturer at Texas State University.

Once billed to be the largest artwork in Scotland, the remains of Charles Jencks’ Fife Earth Project can be found on a rural hillside by the M90. Initially commissioned by Scottish Coal in 2009 to fulfil governmental land restoration requirements, this monumental project aimed to transform a 930-acre coal mine into a major tourist destination which would celebrate the nation’s landscape and international influence. However, after the company went bankrupt in 2013, the initiative was put indefinitely on hold, leaving incomplete sculptures amidst traces of the artist’s colossal landscaping plans. Subsequently, this fragmentary condition has been worsened by the work’s interaction with its local ecology, as overgrowing vegetation, returning wildlife, and weather damage have further obscured its intended state. Moreover, its very nature as a reclamation initiative now feels outdated in the face of growing awareness of corporate greenwashing. In his book Second Site, James Nisbet argues that the site-specificity of land artworks should be reconceptualised in ecological terms which recognise the changing nature of the relatively unmanaged locations in which they are typically situated.

By reflecting on experiencing the Fife Earth Project today, as well as its history and potential futures, in this paper Christie will suggest that Nisbet’s framework should be expanded by attending to what could be understood as the political ecologies of land artworks – that is, their ongoing transmutations as a result of social, political, economic, as well as environmental factors.

Dr Edward Christie is an artist historian based in Fife, Scotland. He recently came to the end of a fixed term contract as an associate lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of St Andrews. His current research critically explores the relationship between modernism and the fossil fuel industry, focusing on instances when extractivist corporations sponsored key proponents of the avant-garde. This builds on his PhD, which is titled, ‘Mobilising Post-War Eco Art History Against the Climate Crisis’, and he completed at UCL in November 2023.

In 2012, on the occasion of an exhibition with Galería González, Madrid, Roger Ackling (1947-2014) remembered the formative experience of viewing a work by climbing a tree with his friend Richard Long. A memory, formed in the late 1960s while both Long and Ackling were students at St Martin’s, it was significant to Ackling’s work over 40 years later.

This paper takes Ackling as a case study and draws from material held in the Roger Ackling Archive, Archive of Sculptors’ Papers HMI, to examine the significance of the making exhibitions for an artist consistently grouped with a British Land Art cohort. Ackling’s career was defined by a remarkable commitment to teaching and a prolific exhibition schedule – making over 160 solo shows, in which small works were massed in increasingly complex installations.

Geitner will explore how the attitudes to making and teaching at St Martin’s in the 1960s translated to the making of exhibitions and how the approaches adopted by Ackling continue to be meaningful for artist’s working today. Key commentaries spanning some 30 years will be addressed; David Reason’s The Unpainted Landscape, 1987; Nicholas Alfrey and Joy Sleemans’ Uncommon Ground 2013; Ben Tufnell’s In land: writing around Land Art and its legacies 2019. These will be considered in the light of Ackling’s own writing and notes for teaching, which speak directly to the artist’s relationship with the natural world and to his own work.

Amanda Geitner studied at the University of Western Australia and began her curatorial career at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth. She was Curator at the Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, from 1995 to 1998, and then Chief Curator at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, until 2015. Amanda is currently Director of the East Anglia Art Fund and is completing a PhD by practice, Roger Ackling: Work and Teaching, with University Arts London and Norwich University of the Arts.

This live, dialogic presentation is a public continuation of a private conversation that has been unfolding between Ghadiali and Sleeman since 2021. Initiated during the global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Ghadiali was activist-in-residence at UCL, their exchange brings together Sleeman’s expertise as a leading scholar of land art in Britain – she is currently professor of art history and theory at UCL Slade School of Fine Art – with Ghadiali’s evolving work as a leading exponent of decolonial environmental research.

Together, they revisit the history of land art through a critical, anti-racist lens – foregrounding interventions by artists such as Rasheed Araeen and Ingrid Pollard in the 1980s as generative challenges to the dominant narratives associated with figures including Richard Long. Their dialogue also reflects on the entangled emergence of land art with the televisual spectacle of the moon landings, exploring how, as with the Gaia theory put forward by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in 1972, the collective act of looking outward onto new, planetary horizons inspired revelatory approaches to the creative act of looking within.

The evolving conversation has played a formative role in Ghadiali’s recent work, including through the development of the decolonial art studio Radical Ecology (established in 2021) and a body of creative projects including Sensing the Planet [public programme] (2021), Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024), Invasion Ecology (2024), and the ongoing programme Dream Ecologies (2024-ongoing). For Sleeman, the dialogue extends ongoing research into the cultural contexts and critical possibilities of land art, past and present. In this live presentation, Sleeman and Ghadiali approach anti-monumentality as a method, in a time of ecological and planetary crisis, of attending, listening, and reimagining the landscape as a site of relational practice and cultural renewal.

Ashish Ghadiali is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores the entanglements of ecology, migration and race through moving image, installation and performance. Recent works – Dream Ecologies (2024-ongoing), Invasion Ecology (2024) and the performance Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature? (with Tsitsi Chirikure and Iman Datoo, 2024) – engage with land, displacement and memory to imagine new forms of relation between people and place.

Joy Sleeman is an art historian and curator whose research concerns the histories of landscape and sculpture, especially 1960s and 1970s Land art, and with a particular focus on works made in Britain. Her publications include essays on Land art, moon landings and aerial landscapes. With Nicholas Alfrey and Ben Tufnell she co-curated the exhibition Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966-1979 (2013-14) and, with Rebecca Partridge, Expanding Painting: Landscape after Land Art (2022-23 and 2025). Joy has a strong commitment to public engagement and developing scholarship and understanding of art related to landscape and environment in public arenas and artistic communities. She is Professor of Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.

Through the forest have I gone,
But Athenian found I none.

– A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, Scene 2

The appropriation and subversion of Land Art and its documentation plays an important, yet under researched part in British sculpture and performance. In this presentation, the authors propose Turner Prize-Winner Jeremy Deller’s (b. 1966) project The Triumph of Art 2025 as a practical case-study in the reception history of Land Art in Britain. From The Battle of Orgreave 2001 to Sacrilege 2012, Deller’s work employs the locations, forms and histories of Land Art, as well as the tropes of their photographic and cinematic documentation. At the same time, the artist regularly introduces absurdist, popular or non-professional elements into his practice, subverting both North American traditions of a heroic sublime and those of a bucolic nostalgia often found in their British counterparts.

On the occasion of the National Gallery’s bicentenary, Deller created The Triumph of Art 2025, choreographing c. 350 participants from all over the UK into a carnivalesque parade from Whitehall past Downing Street onto Trafalgar Square. Common denominator among the eclectic bacchanal of basket-weavers, mummers, Ceilidh-bands, art students, synchronised swimmers, strong people and banner makers was the presence of dancers dressed as standing stones, continuously forming circles, lines and other shapes. Posited in traditional archaeological narratives and popular culture as connecting structures in the British landscape and history, the ridiculousness of the fake megalithic structures dancing in the centre of Empire allows for a discussion of not just the reception of Land Art in the 21st century, but also one of a wider politics of an Encroachment of the Commons and its colonial contexts.

Daniel F. Herrmann is the Ardalan Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London. He was previously Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland and Curator and Head of Curatorial Studies at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. He is an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute, London.

Emily Stone was the Project Curator of the Jeremy Deller Commission at the National Gallery, London. She previously held posts as Assistant Curator, Public Programmes at Tate, as Co-Lead Community of Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and as Inspiring People Participation Manager at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Sean Ketteringham is Assistant Curator at Henry Moore Institute and the curator of Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time. Prior to joining the Institute, his previous curatorial work included projects with Flat Time House, the National Trust, and the Courtauld Collection of works on paper. His first book, Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Mourant will present On Living Stones and Reaching 2020, a durational performance made on Jersey (Channel Islands, UK) over a three-month period on the artist’s family farm. The work builds upon sustained research into the histories of land art, conceived primarily as a playful retaliation to the reductive attitudes towards photography as merely ‘secondary’ in the face of heavy American earthworks, and aligns itself with artists undertaking ephemeral gestures and less intrusive collaborations with the land.

On Living Stones and Reaching is a complex multidisciplinary work, utilising many approaches found within transitory ‘land art’ – photography, moving image, writing and performance – and exists only as a document. Over five grueling days, Mourant hand planted 30,000 potatoes across 52 furrows of earth, with the intent to reach one ‘image’ of the field matured, 83 days later, ready for harvest. The central work consists of self-reflexive prose, The Wilderness of Words, a cacophonous vessel of voices, amounting to 28,000 words.

While the project reflects on agriculture, labour and cultural heritage, it also proliferates and deepens metaphysically, to question the ontology of images. On Living Stones and Reaching speculates on a broader analogy between agricultural production and the image economy, embodying what Peter Szendy describes as ‘the supermarket of images’ or ‘iconomy’. The work resonates with many of the artists featured in Passing Strange, in addition to Agnes Denes (Rice/Tree/Burial, 1968), Dennis Oppenheim (Directed Seeding-Cancelled Crop, 1969), Keith Arnatt (Self-Burial, 1969), Michelle Stuart, Fina Miralles Nobell, Teresa Murak and Hans Haacke.

Alexander Mourant is an artist, educator and writer based in London. He Lecturer in Photography at Kingston University. His first publication The Night and the First Sculpture, was published by Folium in 2024. Mourant is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute (2025-26). Recent exhibitions include To Walk in the Image, Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland (2023), At the Farthest Edge: Rebuilding Photography, NOUA, Norway (2023) and A Sudden Vanishing, Seen Fifteen Gallery, London (2023). He is a recipient of grants from Arts Council Norway, Arts Council England and ArtHouse Jersey. He has been commissioned by FT Weekend Magazine, Hapax Magazine and The Greatest Magazine and Photomonitor. Mourant is a member of Revolv Collective and contributor at C4 Journal. He achieved BA Photography at Falmouth University and MA Photography at Royal College of Art, London.

In a recent retrospective, Robert Smithson’s 1972 performance lecture Hotel Palenque was represented as a looping installation: a carousel of slides paired with audio of the artist’s meandering narration. This presentation invited ambient, nonlinear viewing, simultaneously emphasising Smithson’s recursive structure and creating an experience well-suited to the contemporary attention-depleted museum-goer. It also revealed the ways in which the artist’s associative writing style prefigured the fractured way we build knowledge today. If Smithson’s style reflected the way our chaotic built environment results from unplanned accretions of human activity, it also anticipated our contemporary virtual architectures, in which we receive information as fragments, dislocated from origin or chronology.

This presentation addresses these ideas by reimagining Hotel Palenque in a new performance-lecture. Adopting the original performance structure and Smithson’s discursive speaking style, this new lecture will use digital images in place of his 35mm slides and address how the artist’s account of the Yucatan hotel aligns with the way we perceive place through digital and time-based media. Citing other artworks like Tacita Dean’s Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty 1997, and JG 2013, that expand his logic of layering, erosion and uncertainty, it will use this experimental format to examine the ‘afterlife’ of his thought in dematerialised, anti-monumental mediums. In doing so, it will consider how the ‘de-architecturalisation’, Smithson identifies in Hotel Palenque manifests in the way we experience and construct the world today.

Allyson Packer is an artist working in video and installation to examine how we navigate an increasingly destabilised reality. Her immersive essay films blend archival material, sound and nonlinear narrative to explore digital disorientation and the collapse of shared truths. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Torrance Art Museum, Brown Arts Institute, Nahmad Contemporary, The Ostrale Biennial and DIS art. She holds and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives in Brooklyn where she is Teaching Assistant Professor of Visual Art & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology.

According to author and essayist Barry Lopez, wolves primarily scent-mark not to warn off intruders but to establish ‘cognitive maps’ for the resident pack; they urinate in the landscape to find each other. Taking up this idea of orientation and belonging, Pearce’s presentation considers the creative and political limits of pissing in nature as a form of anti-monumental land art. Her enquiry focuses on Helen Chadwick and Charlie Prodger, exploring their engagement with contested British landscapes marked by nationalism and climate crisis, from the coastal military range of Chadwick’s Viral Landscapes 1989 to the borderlands of Berwick-Upon-Tweed in Prodger’s LHB 2017.

Pearce explores pissing in nature as a contradictory gesture with pleasurable and violent associations, an action that reveals how gender and sexuality shapes the way we move through the landscape. In the ephemeral spirit of Goldsworthy or Long, creating artworks with urine transforms organic waste into something productive. By reading Chadwick and Prodger’s pissing in nature as a kind of scent-marking, she makes a case for olfactory interpretations that resist the visual and permanent, revisiting longstanding tensions within land art between documentation and artwork, gallery and environment.

This presentation deploys an embodied approach, shaped by Pearce’s experience living in rural West Wales. Moving between poetry and prose, it draws on conversations with Prodger and site writing at locations along the Pembrokeshire coast depicted in Viral Landscapes. Pearce narrates these ‘prolific encounters’ (to borrow Chadwick’s phrase) in a series of ‘scenes’ that expose the erotic terrain of queer research.

Dr Naomi Pearce is a writer. Her fiction, criticism and biography has appeared in Art Monthly, Happy Hypocrite, e-flux Criticism and The White Review, amongst others. Her writing on affective and embodied archival methods has been published in ‘Gestures: A Body of Work’, Manchester University Press and a special issue of the British Art Studies journal ‘Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s’, both 2025. Recent live projects include Out of the Frame, National Library Wales, Aberystwyth and Experimentica 2024, in collaboration with Stuart Middleton, Chapter, Cardiff. Her first novel, Innominate, was published by MOIST in 2023 with Iain Sinclair describing the book as “a classic of local archaeology”. She teaches interdisciplinary practice at Aberystwyth University.

Land Art Lives is an (inter)national program and growing network dedicated to the future of land art. Launched in 2024 with a series of preparatory events, it culminated in the international conference Land Art Lives in October 2024 with speakers including Humberto Moro of Dia Art Foundation, Britta Peters of Urbane Künste Ruhr, Lisa Le Feuvre of Holt/Smithson Foundation and Anja Noval of University of Amsterdam. In 2025, the program continues with a focus on the preservation of original land artworks and the emergence of new forms of land art – for instance with the Holt/Smithson Annual Lecture by artist Katie Paterson in October.

Within the program we view land art not as a closed chapter in art history but as a living, evolving field. Land Art Lives addresses the development, presentation and protection of land art, offering a platform for collaboration, knowledge exchange, and dialogue among artists, owners, managers, researchers, policymakers, and the public.

By re-engaging with existing (monumental) works and fostering new (performative) approaches, Land Art Lives aims to strengthen connections between art, landscape, ecology, heritage, and society. In our talk, we will present the Dutch land art as the starting point for an international discussion. We aim to explore the Dutch situation within a global context, highlighting strategies for a sustainable future for this unique cultural heritage and reflecting on our evolving relationship with the land and the surface of the earth.

Land Art Lives is initiated by Anne Reenders (Lead Program of Artmuseum Jij bent M. and Land Art Contemporary) and Martine van Kampen (director of Land Art Flevoland). Both trained as art historians, we have extensive experience in art and public space as curators and advisors. In recent years, our focus has been on Dutch land art, particularly the Flevoland collection and Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in Emmen. Since its start, Land Art Lives has collaborated with leading partners including the Cultural Heritage Agency, University of Amsterdam, Stroom Den Haag and Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Ben Tufnell is a writer and curator based in London. His books include Land Art (Tate Publishing, 2006) and In Land: Writings Around Land Art and Its Legacies (Zero Books, 2019). He is also the author of two novels, The North Shore (Fleet, 2023) and Paradise (Influx Press, 2026). Selected essays, interviews and curatorial projects are archived at www.bentufnell.com.

In this paper, van der Leuw will argue that it is especially through the medium of film that the artists working in so-called Land Art in the 1960s and 1970s were able to deconstruct the human-centric view of monumental Earthworks, in an answer to a newly felt urgency, starting with the (at that time) novel ecological movement, to connect humans back to the natural environment. She connects these early lens-based works to the recent emergence of a ‘kin-centric’ world view, in which nature is seen as the playground, or building ground, of human activity, but is in every way ‘like us’ – our ‘kin’. As Andy Goldworthy famously said, “We ARE nature.”

The first Land Art exhibition in Europe, LAND ART (1968/1969), was screened on television and produced by Gerry Schum, and consisted of eight short films directed by eight European and American artists. This television exhibition, only visible when screened or broadcast, was a radical attempt to move art away from the (often monumental) object and into the transience of a dynamic film image (the photograph in flux) that continuously unfolds in time.

Van der Leuw will first focus on the short films by Richard Long (UK), Barry Flanagan (UK), and Jan Dibbets (NL), part of Schum’s television exhibition, and Mary Kelly’s London-based work An Earthwork Performed (1970), to connect Land Art to the concept of anti-monumentality, transience, and ephemerality. She will then establish a connection to three contemporary artists (UK and Europe) who are using film, through which she will show the legacy of Land Art in envisioning a future kin-centric world.

Dr. Sajda van der Leeuw is a lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art in the department of History of Art at Utrecht University. She is an art historian and philosopher, with a DPhil in History of Art from the University of Oxford (2021), an MA in Art History and Archaeology from New York University (2014), and a Research MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam (2012). Her PhD dissertation discusses the ‘Big Picture Effect’ through the use of photography and film (and even television) in Land Art in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and America.