Sculpture: Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings

Artist: Nancy Holt

 

For our Visual Dialogue class at Western Washington University, Becka Bock, MacKenzie Hattrup, and I, Jonathan Davidson, visited and researched Nancy Holt’s sculpture, Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings on campus.

When our group first saw Nancy Holt’s Rock Rings, we each felt that it was a place meant for meditation and reflection. There was a sense of comfort, peace, and quietude about it, as well as a sense of mystery. It reminded us of churches, ceremonial grounds, castles, the ruins of Stonehenge, and all sorts of things pertaining to the cosmic and the past. Becka described the piece as seeming like “an earthly sculpture with unearthly purpose.”

 

Entering the stone enclosure, being able to look up at the sky and out at the trees through the windows, we felt as though we were apart from the outside world, in a safe and intimate space where we could take the time to think. The fact that the sculpture was positioned in nature contributed to this. Being within a circular space also reminded us of unity, interconnection, and for some us, eternity, which added to the feeling of tranquility and the desire for reflection.

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Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1938, and grew up in New Jersey. She majored in Biology at Tufts University, and began her art career making films and videos before creating the site-specific sculptures she is known for today. Her works encourage and enable viewers to be active participants in their environment. Indeed, without viewer participation, her work would mean nothing—her sculptures are dependent on visitors interacting with a space.

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Rock Rings was created between 1977 and 1978. It is a part of Holt’s Locator series, a collection that focuses on natural celestial occurrences such as solstices and constellation patterns. Nancy Holt originally intended for Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings to function as “a removed, meditative space” where people could reflect on their place in the environment and observe their natural surroundings. As a site-specific sculpture, it was essential that the work be reflective of the area it was built on, and Holt spent months familiarizing herself with the Northwest before coming up with a design for the piece. In order to relate Rock Rings back to its environment, Holt used local schist to build the sculpture, and had local mason Al Poynter construct the work. Rock Rings was also mapped according to the placement of the north star, which brought an additional celestial component to its position within the landscape. In this way, the sculpture is not only linked to the physical area on which it was built, but the universe as a whole, as well. This further feeds Holt’s original intent of having viewers reflect on their environment and the natural beauty of their immediate surroundings, as well as their place within the cosmos itself.

 

The meaning of the work has evolved since the building of the Academic Instruction Center (AIC) on Western’s campus in 2008, which changed the space in which Rock Rings existed. Holt had originally intended for her piece to be removed from all academic buildings, but now, existing in such close proximity to one, Rock Rings functions as a sort of sanctuary.

 

Without someone to interact with Rock Rings, and without the Northwestern environment on which it was built, it would cease to have meaning. This makes the sculpture dependent on its environment. Because Rock Rings was built with Western and the Northwest in mind, and is designed to be reflective of these places, if they were to change, so would the piece’s meaning. The environment and the sculpture are interconnected.

 

 

Created by:

MacKenzie Hattrup, Jonathan Davidson and Becka Bock

-Video filmed by Becka

(Music for video by relaxing from bensound.com)

-Photographs taken by MacKenzie

-Written description by Jonathan