The Menengiyn Tal, Eastern Mongolia
Research
My work begins and ends with land.
This is my question — how do I describe in visual artistic form the human encounter with vast, open landscape?
This question is complex, for it is as much about time as it is about space, and space transforms into place. Place holds deep time, and time shapes the experience of place. Vast time and place extend beyond the limits of my knowing, and my relative ease or unease with the unknown shape my perception and experience.
For me, a walk through a field of grass results in a journey through space, place, and time – the past, present, and future. I am fascinated that in order to traverse immensity, my mind becomes finely attuned to subtlety.
I have pursued this question through long-standing relationships to the place(s) that I make work about. The relationship is fundamental. I need to hold internal knowing, recognition, and memory of the lines of horizon, hills, rocks, of the way light changes through days and seasons. I must understand my personal place within a landscape and the context of its history and culture.
I hold that there is presence to land and place that is beyond the surface time of human activity. Much of what I transmit through artwork is of the unseen experience, and I use the specificity of land, form, and shape to communicate what is unnamable. In the end, I make drawings and moving images that create spaces of quiet, deep stillness.
My work has become the story of time told through the language of place.
Origins
I grew up in a remote, rural area at the eastern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, the descendant of families who settled there in the early 1900s. My childhood consisted of imaginative walks through pastures and long drives down dirt roads with my parents. At 18, I had scholarships to study art but took a detour and married into a trucking/ranching family and worked as a truck driver. I hauled cattle throughout the Great Plains for over 7 years, making stops at countless locations from Montana to Texas found only through subtle descriptions of geography or by counting miles.
While my personal and family history is tied to the Plains, my work is not based in nostalgia – it originates from a physical, mental, and emotional need to move in and through open land. In 2008, I traveled to Mongolia to experience a similar yet foreign landscape. I went in search of true openness – place unplaced. I found it, and with it, fear and claustrophobia from an openness that I did not know how to control. This powerful encounter continues to inform my work and give me perspective on my relationship to land and place.
My interest extends beyond visceral, personal need into an abiding engagement with the history, culture, and environmental concerns of large but delicate grasslands, and now after two decades near Lake Superior, the edge-world of vast water and rocky land. I am rooted in rural working class experience and shaped by grit and determination. From trucking to art, I have navigated male-dominated spaces and professions. I find inspiration from contemporary Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, artists, and activists who look at land, culture, and environment, the study of place and language, and political studies centering around land use and history. Artistic influences include William Kentridge, edo-period Japanese prints and painting, James Turrell and Walter De Maria, and the many other artists, known and unknown, who have taught me through their work.
Process
My process begins with walking and moving through land. The places I move through I visit again and again, often camping there. I pause to sit and to observe and draw. I photograph for reference and employ all of this information into my finished work.
Drawings and large works on paper are created with graphite pencil and pigment. My animations are created through stop-motion techniques with graphite on paper which is drawn, erased, photographed, drawn, erased, and photographed, over and over until movement is achieved.
The projects I create are large in scope and develop over several years of engagement with a site and through many months and even years of working in the studio.
Place(s)
For more than a decade, much of my work has centered in the Sage Creek Basin in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, Lakota Homelands. I began working there, in part, because as a National Park it is publicly accessible. But it is also a place of personal and family significance for me. It is a few hours from of my childhood home, is an area I drove through regularly as a trucker, and an important place for two people who helped me in a crucial time in my life. I am aware and recognize that this land is also where some of the most egregious acts in U.S. history towards the Native peoples that lived there unfolded. I am sorry for that, and for the loss of lives and bison that unfolded in the region. This dichotomy of a place that holds multiple realities is a tension I do not ignore. In my life, I have found that beauty and sorrow walk closely together. The bad-lands — in my mind — are one of the most beautiful places on earth.
After two decades since first coming to the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, I am starting to make work about this place. I can live here because of the vast horizon of Lake Superior, but it is completely different than the spaciousness of the Plains. I cannot walk into that openness. Here I always stand on an edge line. Here I am learing the language of the moving currents and surface disruptions of water and the density and lines of ancient rock.
— Catherine Meier, January 2025