“Do you know the phrase ‘Many hands make light work’?” asks Rogers, who takes the adage quite literally. To minimize his impact on the environment, he employs members of local communities (so far 7,500 total) to manually pass each stone from point A to point B. Each of his projects takes the proverbial village—he consults with both local environmental and political authorities and community elders. He targets otherwise unusable land, and ensures that the men and women he employs are paid equally.
Architectural Digest Land Artist Andrew Rogers...
Land Artist Andrew Rogers’s Monumental Works Defy Belief
The creative mastermind travels around the world building sculptures that measure over 600 feet across.
TEXT BY JANELLE ZARA Posted July 13, 2017
At 34 feet tall and weighing in at seven tons, Unfurling Energy, the twisting bronze-and-steel sculpture artist Andrew Rogers unveiled at the energy-themed Expo 2017 that recently opened in Astana, Kazakhstan, is no small feat. Compared to many of his other works, however, it’s absolutely minuscule. For the past 16 years, the Melbourne-based sculptor has traveled to the extremes of all seven continents for his “Rhythms of Life” series: geoglyphs, or monumental works of stone, measuring upward of 650 feet across. Rogers plants his sculptures directly into “topographically interesting places,” he says, which have included the lowest point on Earth and the Great Wall of China’s western terminus in the Gobi Desert. Despite their monumental size, however, his works leave a very small footprint.
“The work only exists for a moment in time, but you have to be responsible,” Rogers says. “It would be arrogant of me to go in and impose my own values.” His Land Art, as well as the sculptures of studio practice, are an homage to the preservation of history, heritage, and most importantly, to the earth.
Sacred, 2008
“I look for sites of history and heritage,” says Rogers. This figure of a horse, installed on the hillside below the 900-year-old Spissky Castle in Slovakia, was made from scraps of travertine marble.
The project employed more than 800 locals, and was blessed bu a Pachamama shaman before it began.