Mud songs for anni
Raw rammed earth, glazed clay, recycled rope, Schneider Museum Of Art, Ashland, Oregon
Mud Songs For Anni, a sculpture commissioned for Art Beyond 2023, is an homage to Anni Albers and the soil beneath our feet. Constructed with raw rammed earth , it keeps a light carbon footprint and makes minimal additions to the waste stream.
Inspired by Albers’ fascination with botanical structures and her close reading of Goethe’s The Metamorphosis Of Plants, the project revisits this little-known historical tether between nature and the built environment.
For this work Albers’s small-scale textile piece titled City (1949) is approached as an inspiration and a kind of blueprint for a large, outdoor sculpture made of soil and clay. Mud Songs For Anni invites visitors to explore soil through sculpture and this highly sustainable method of building.
A kind of map inspired by City depicts where elements of the sculpture come from in the original textile. The map is handmade with cyanotype prints, layered with gouache accents and continues to foreground materiality and visual engagement as it explores larger environmental themes.
Why Soil, Dirt and Mud? In today’s world, when we need to reimagine how we live, build, eat, move from one place to another and discard our trash, Mud Songs asks us to reconsider and reacquaint ourselves with the very dirt beneath our feet. Soil and dirt are at the core of historical and indigenous traditions of construction and agriculture, which today are also at the forefront of the fight against the climate crisis. Earthen construction methods offer great potential for a substantial reduction of carbon emissions. They are not just the past. They are the future.
At the end of the exhibition, Mud Songs For Anni will be dispersed back into the earth.
Link to Anni Albers City, 1949
A special thanks to the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Zero Foot Hills, art residence and Aimee Burg, Clay Space Space, Janine Sopp and Nina Berinstein.
