Our Work

Andy Goldsworthy: Three Cairns Installations

Des Moines, Iowa

Confluence was retained by the Des Moines Arts Center to assist artist Andy Goldsworthy in the placement of his Three Cairns project. This art piece explores questions of presence and absence. The piece as a whole encompasses the entire country, with the first of the three eight-foot tall cairns in New York’s Neuberger Museum of Art, the second in San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the final cairn on the Des Moines Art Center grounds. The Des Moines site also includes three stone walls approximately 13 feet high, almost nine feet deep and 14 feet wide, each roughly 60 feet from the central Cairn. These walls are solid on three sides, with the forth side, facing the cairn, containing a large opening, chiseled to form a cavity duplicating one of the three cairns in shape and size. In each wall, then, negative space forms a cairn. The Des Moines cairns use indigenous stone and are set among trees in a park-like setting and were constructed with mathematical precision. The stones were precisely cut to form a smooth gradated surface; the three wall structures have accurately squared corners and even sides. While maintaining the shape and therefore the implications and meanings of cairns, Goldsworthy creates an affinity between these structures and the bordering architecture of the Art Center.

Confluence also assisted in the landscape restoration following the installation and worked closely with Andy on the planting design for the installation’s context to the Art Center, nearby Rose Garden and Greenwood Park as a whole.

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