Each year thousands of people flock to Peru to fly over the famous Lines of Nazca. These land artworks - animals such as monkeys, birds, spiders, as well as giant geometric forms - were constructed around 500 BC, yet today they still capture our attention and causes us to wonder.
How such amazing and accurate etchings were made on such a scale is still a mystery.. What is certain is that they were deeply significant for the Nazcan peoples - and here today, two thousand years on, as the number of tourist flights attest, we are still marveling at the beauty and meaning of these land artworks.
Land Art is primal and primary. It was the way ‘art’ happened way, way back - when art was the way man sought to converse with man, with God, with all of elemental life. For those conversations, he went to the earth as canvas. Ancient man knew that the land was alive and that he was one seamless part of that aliveness. As at Nazca, he scratched and scraped the earth into fantastical designs. He went to caves with muddied hand-prints and burning charcoal, drawing multi-legged beasts that leapt to life by fire light. He piled rocks, sticks and bones into mounds, and cairns, and totem poles - all as a way to speak, and to hear - as a way of experiencing his small life as part of one greater life.
Today the land is still alive. And as much as we have traveled far away from feeling our oneness with the earth, we can return, and rejoin. Land art is a way to take us there.
Project Ánimo aims to create a series of land art ‘biomorphs’, animal forms, in the wildes of nature. Apart from the beauty of each of the designs, the animals themselves are messengers. Some, like the puma, are a cry for preservation: this golden-eyed lion once roamed from the Canadian Rockies all the way to the farthest tip of the Andes. Now the puma is scarce – found only in pockets dotted through the Americas. As for our magnificent equine companions... No animal can parallel the role of equus in changing the course of civilization. It was the pounding hooves of the horse that galloped across the Steppes bringing the East to meet the West. It was the horse, by the thousands, who nobly bowed to carry men to war throughout all centuries. And it is the horse today that still bends to man’s wishes, to gallop the racetrack for a gambler’s glory.
Like the Nazcans, we can redefine our identity through the creation of land art. We can regain our kinship with all life, and remember our role as stewards of this fragile planet. Project Ánimo ART is a spearhead for that vision.
