ABSTRACT
This chapter considers altered environments and focuses on work by artists who fabricate, intervene or install in order to create scenarios that explore artists’ responses to phenomena and express this metaphorically. Two key points underpin the discussion: first, it is not the case that an artist comes along, finds a static situation and animates it. Rather, the artist explores places through photographing, using pictures to express the results of an investigation. Second, environments are intrinsically mutable. Other land art interventions are subtler, often conceptually founded in mutability with legacies of happenings documented photographically. Thomas Jackson states, the hovering installations featured in this ongoing series of photographs are inspired by self-organizing, 'emergent' systems in nature such as termite mounds, swarming locusts, schooling fish and flocking birds. The chapter also focuses engagements in open space, in order to explore ways in which artists deploy aesthetic strategies intended to highlight sensations of place.
