I didn’t want to make a sign or a symbol in the landscape as earthworks do; I wanted to work with its topography. How do you make walking and looking the content of your work? What happens to your body when the elevation is constantly shifting and there’s no horizon to orient you, no flat plane? How do you cut into the land, gather it in a volume, and hold that volume?

• Richard Serra

To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

∆ Barry Lopez, from Arctic Dreams (Bantam, 1986)

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places―retreated to most often when we are most remote from them―are among the most important landscapes we possess.

| Robert Macfarlane