Woodstock #4

In the early 1970s, Michelle Stuart began working on large-scale paper scrolls that used frottage (a rubbing technique) to capture the topography of the Earth’s surface. Some of these drawings were made with dirt, while others, including this one, were rendered with graphite. They were inspired by Stuart’s work as a cartographic draftsperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as by her experience of the ubiquitous photographs of the moon that circulated in the 1960s, the products of a series of NASA missions culminating in the moon landing. Stuart has since turned primarily to photography, a process that, like her rubbings, is based on the notion of the index, in which the work is a record of what it physically encounters.

Unlike many canonical examples of Land art, Stuart’s drawings rely on an intimate relationship between the artist’s hand and the earth, which led many early critics of her work to align it with explicitly feminist practices that emphasized the body. Stuart’s ultimate interest is in the traces we leave on the Earth, and the Earth’s reciprocal shaping of our identities. As she has put it, “We imprint and are imprints of all that came before.”