The Menengiyn Tal, Eastern Mongolia
Research
How do I describe in visual form the human encounter with vast, open landscape?
This question holds complexity for me, for it is as much about time as it is about place. Place holds deep time, and time shapes the experience of place. Vast time and place reach beyond the limits of my knowing, and my relative ease or unease with the unknown shapes my perception. For me, a walk through a field of grass results in a journey through both space and time – the past, present, and future. I am fascinated that in order to traverse immense spaces my mind becomes finely attuned to subtlety.
A settler descendent, I grew up in a remote, rural area at the eastern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills. My childhood consisted of imaginative walks through pastures and long drives down dirt roads with my parents. At 18, I married into a trucking/ranching family and started working as a truck driver. I hauled cattle throughout the Great Plains for over 7 years, making stops at countless locations found only through subtle descriptions of geography or by counting miles driven.
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 these large but delicate grasslands. I am rooted in rural working class experience, and I find inspiration and guidance from contemporary Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, the study of place and language, political studies centering around land use and history, and the many artists, both known and unknown, who have taught me through their work.
The experience of deep listening in specific locations forms the core of my artistic process. My final drawings and animations originate from my movement through land, which I document through field sketches and photographs, and are created through many months and even years of working in the studio. For the past decade, most of my work has derived from the Sage Creek Basin in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, located within Lakota Homelands. I began working there, in part, because it is publicly accessible. But most importantly, it is a place of personal and family significance for me.
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.
— Catherine Meier