I Am The Space Where I Am: Meadow Corner

Site-specific installation at In Situ: Polyculture Commons in Saxton River, Vermont, 2026

Medium: earth and stone (no stabilizers)

Collaboration with: Arseny Pekurovsky

Project Description: To build a corner in the meadow. Two individual porous walls of compacted earth and stone from the meadow come together at right angles to suggest a corner. In a capitalist culture that is not just destroying our land but also that is so much about distraction, speed, and efficiency, we hope to invite viewers to dwell on the ground under our feet, to remember that we’re earthlings, and to enter into a different kind of time and space – a pace of earth – encouraging a relationship of intimacy with matter. We humans are earth’s skin in some sense – our bodies, shadows and even our voices (though more invisibly), cast layers of being on earth. We’re earth’s shawl, just as it ours. We encourage dreamers of angles and curves to imagine a corner in which to nestle in this space of earth. In this site-specific installation, the two sheets of earth in the ground that we have built never touch — it is the meadow itself that completes the “corner.” This means that the corner is in effect invisible, absent, suggested, evoked. Nature, the land, space — the “unbuilt,” or uncivilized— is what completes the imaginary angle or curve of a “corner,” where a dreamer might take refuge and wander. To emphasize this fleeting, wandering, spacious “corner,” we placed the walls apart in such a way (one facing west, one north) in such a way that, depending on where one stands in the meadow, the walls align in order to create what looks like a corner. At other vantage points, the walls are separate. We built this piece out of earth from the local landscape, using no stabilizers. We also built the walls to be as thin as possible, because we wanted to encourage an image (and thing) of fragility. This is an ephemeral site-specific work as a result. Eventually, the rain the winds, the storms, the weather in general, as well as those living in the land (flora and fauna) will reclaim the earth that is theirs to begin with.

“We suspect that by questioning the foundations of civilization, the myth of human centrality, the imagined isolation, we may find the beginning” of new paths…If we are right, it will be necessary to go literally beyond the Pale. Outside the stockades we have built – the city walls, the original marker in stone or wood that first separated “man” from “nature.” Beyond the gates, out into the wilderness, is where we are headed. And there we shall make for the higher ground for, as Jeffers wrote, ‘when the cities lie at the monster’s feet/ there are left the mountains.’ We shall make the pilgrimage to the poet’s Dark Mountain, to the great, immovable, inhuman heights which were here before us and will be here after us. And from their slopes we shall look back upon the pinprick lights of the distant cities and gain perspective on who we are and what we have become.”

— Uncivilisation: Dark Mountain Manifesto

“But a klaxon made me come out of the angle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream."

— Czeslaw Milosz