We consider some of the multiple ways in which artists mediate relationships between ‘site’ and artwork. The Trail is a popular, temporary annual local arts event that invites international artists, students and community art groups to create and exhibit site-sensitive sculpture within Hardcastle Crags in Yorkshire, England. This paper traces the creative processes employed by artists participating in the 2004 Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail and examines relationships between, place art and site-specificity. This dissertation concludes by proposing that Neolithic stone circles exemplify the first separation of nature from culture, whereas land artists seek to echo prehistoric values by reintegrating nature and culture on an ephemeral and site-specific basis. A combination of visual analysis, exploration of relevant critical theory and phenomenology of the landscape is used to investigate both the prehistoric monuments and contemporary land art. This analysis is focused around the writing of Lucy Lippard, John K Grande, William Malpas and Malcolm Andrews and their views of the dialectic between nature from culture, inspiring analysis of modern environmental anxieties relating to permanence and ephemerality. These strands inform the debate in Chapter 3, which compares prehistoric monuments and land art by examining the varying ways that the circle can signify their respective social landscapes. In Chapter 2 the connections between nature and contemporary artists are explored using the artists Andy Goldsworthy, Julie Brook and Richard Long, by examining their comments and intentions as well as the themes exhibited in their work, such as site-specificity and ephemerality. Chapter 1 discusses the theories presented by historians and archaeologists such as Christopher Tilley, Aubrey Burl, Richard Bradley and Francis Pryor to inform a discussion which explores the aesthetics, purposes and reasons for the construction of Neolithic monuments, using the example of Castlerigg stone circle. My research is centred around the circle as a metaphor for societal relationships towards natural and human-influenced environments, characterised in the separation of nature and culture. This dissertation is a comparative phenomenological study of attitudes towards landscape in Neolithic stone circles and in contemporary land art.
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