Catherine Meier
Standing Witness
site: Sage Creek
"For me, it begins and ends with landscape."
- Terry Tempest Williams
Project Description:
Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek is a hand drawn animation that records and illuminates the temporality, fragility, and vastness of the ancient land located within and around the Sage Creek Campground in South Dakota’s Badlands National Park. Graphite is set into motion through a draw, photograph, erase, and redraw method, and this earthy substance depicts grasses, sagebrush, and crumbling dirt. It reveals the detailed and changing horizon line, the shadows of passing, and the evolution of land as related to this place. These moving drawings that explore terrain become a visual poetry of place, allowing a viewer to relax into their rhythmic movement, or pause to catch detailed fragments of this overwhelming space.
In projecting the animation at the site of its origins, Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek becomes art at play. Art is connected to the world in a visceral way, creating a new space for encountering both the landscape and the artwork. It is also an act of ritual, paying homage and attention to land and place. The animation will be set up every evening, allowing for unpredictable happenings as both campers and weather come and go. For me, it is the ultimate fun as an artist – going out to the land from which I derive my inspiration to explore how the artwork I make is revealed or transformed by its natural surroundings.