Friday, January 13, 2012

Foam Fresh Walls




A good painter can trace the beauty of any landscape. A waller is just a different kind of landscape artist. They work with nothing but rocks and have bigger canvases. From above one can see they are creating more than just a random patchwork of fields. The large flowing contours they define are really the outlines of expediency; the lines made by clearing and hauling the stones to the closest and often curving perimeter, before committing to making something ‘continuous’ of them. Instead of the pasture shapes all merging into each other, there is an ordered gathering or ‘crystallization’ of stones along the farm field borders. 



Everything fits, because the walls, by definition, have dual functionality. They act as continuous borders on both sides of each field. The thin ribbons of stones between each field amount to nothing and yet they are everything. They are the decoration and the structure. All the interesting planes and surfaces of the land butt up to one another to become an organized and purposeful network. The fields ‘materialize’ out of necessity, almost like crowded bubbles forming in foam.