Chris Drury1998

Chris Drury walks - and works - in the wild landscapes of the world. Over the last twenty years, he has developed an impressive and highly personal repertoire of sculptural responses to the natural environment. This book is the first to explore the work of this highly inventive English artist. Drury's experiences of places or journeys around the globe are expressed in two kinds of sculpture: cairns or shelters, sometimes filled with fire, which are built in remote and often beautiful locations, and meticulously worked baskets and exquisitely formed "bundles" - of bone, wood, leaf, grass, feather, stone - which are created later from materials picked up along the way. Thus, a basket made of heather, wool, and stone recalls a shelter made of heather branches, and is, in turn, echoed ten years later by a dewpond in Sussex, England, cut into a maze of intersecting channels. A cairn built in a canyon in New Mexico is followed, in time, by etched and bound elk bones from a mountain-lion kill there. Kay Syrad's introduction analyzes Chris Drury's sculpture in the context of late-twentieth-century environmental art, providing valuable insights into the artist's motivations. Drury's own commentaries, together with the highly evocative photographs of his work, convey his passionate exploration of humanity's relationship to nature, as well as his appreciation of the natural world as one in which people have their place and have made their mark.