“Running Fence”

In the process of creating the guerrilla installations and working with the materials at hand, I reflected more and more on  ways to directly leverage these natural cycles. One of the first pieces to come from this line of thinking was Running Fence, an installation that used the shadows cast by red poles to mark the movement of the sun. In this piece I used 6-foot long closet poles as fence posts and the shadows they cast as the connecting wire. The idea was to place the first fence post, follow the shadow, and place the next fence post at the end of the shadow, with the other posts following in succession. When all the posts were used, the first post placed is moved up to the front, and so on. I proceeded to run from the front of the line to the back of the line to collect the next pole, thus it became a roving fence line. The shadows shift faster than you might think so I had to move with alacrity to keep the poles in alignment.

“Sacred Space” maquette

This piece initiated multiple time-based explorations. As a static installation the poles could be used to mark pregnant celestial moments such as high tide or the winter solstice. This also inspired me to explore ways the poles could be strategically aligned to create structures. Simply by waiting for the sun to move, the shifting of the shadows creates an alignment that imbues the structure with a heavenly aura like a modern-day Stonehenge. See the maquettes in this gallery.

“High Tide to High Tide: Starting at high tide, use a traffic cone to form and place sand cones along the high tide line until the next high tide clears the beach.”

The temporal fence this piece created also planted the seeds for the stacking a line installations. While not applying the same shadow alignment, these installations still tap into the human desire to partition the land and the inherent absurdity in establishing permanent boundaries in a constantly changing landscape.

The thinking that initially inspired this piece likewise could be brought to fruition. Due to space constraints, the running fence concept was only partially realized. Ideally I would like to follow fence posts for a day and map the journey the sun and terrain direct. Even though this would roughly follow a horseshoe path, it would require a much larger expanse of forest-free and structure-free land than is afforded on the east coast. I remain on the lookout for a suitable site or sites  to execute this and am open to suggestion.