Characteristics
A form of contemporary art, known also as Earthworks, or Earth Art, this artistic movement emerged in America during the 1960s when a number of sculptors and painters - such as Robert Smithson (1938-73) - determined to heighten public awareness of Man's relationship with the natural world by intervening in the landscape in a series of thought-provoking constructions.
These (frequently massive) land-based interventions or artworks took a variety of forms, from large-scale land artworks like man-made curtains reaching across vast stretches of landscape, the encirclement of whole islands in coloured fabric, and reshaped waterways and volcanoes, to simple lines of footprints in the earth.
Although the precise meaning of each construction varied, the underlying aim of this novel type of visual art was to create artistic imagery using earth, rocks, soil and other natural material, with a view to increasing our sensibility towards our environment.