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)