Sculpting the earth - artistic interventions with the landscape. Strijdom van der Merwe

Protea Book House, 2011. Hardcover, 184 pages. Good, clean condition; like new.

As a land artist Strijdom van der Merwe uses the materials provided by the chosen site. His sculptural forms take shape in relation to the landscape. What remains is a photographic image, a fragment of the imagination. It is a process of working with the natural world using sand, water, wood and rocks, he shapes these elements into geometrical forms that participate with their environment, continually changing until their final probable destruction. He observes the fragility of beauty while not lamenting its passing. While a visual record is materially all that is left, he also leaves us a reminder of the capacity, however feeble, of an individual to alter the universe by embracing the ceaseless changing of nature, actively contributing to it and in so doing, modulating and beautifying the outcome.

Strijdom van der Merwe (b. 1961) is a full-time land artist who lives in Stellenbosch. He studied art at the Universities of Stellenbosch (South Africa), Hooge School Voor de Kunste (Utrecht, Holland), the Academy of Art and Architecture (Prague, the Czech Republic) and the Kent Institute of Art and Design (Canterbury, England)