CHRIS DRURY
STATEMENT


I am categorised as a land artist or someone who works with art and nature. In reality my work explores nature and culture, inner and outer. I travel and walk in out-of-the-way places, often alone. More recently I have been looking at Body as Landscape or systems within the body and systems on the planet.

I have also worked extensively with small communities in Europe, Japan and America, collaborating with others and making work that fits with the needs of the community and is an integral part of the landscape.

A defining characteristic of all my works is that they draw attention to something which is outside of the work itself, they are not self-referential.

My work has taken the following forms:
Uncommissioned work outside shelters, cairns and fire cairns (documented by photographs)
Commissioned work outside shelter works, vessels and cloud/wave chambers (camera obscuras), large woven and growing works, earth works and a wave garden, an installation in a barn and a dry-stone vortex maze.
Gallery-based works including shelters and cairns (photoworks), baskets, photo/basket works, chambers and large woven works as installations, work with medicinal and poisonous plants, bundles, wave pattern works, wall drawings in earth, and installations with peat, works on paper including works using earth pigments and blood, mushroom print works, word works, woven maps, echocardiograms, works in light boxes, project drawings and plans and hand-made books.


“Chris Drury’s art is a story of rhythms, tensions and conflicts, labour, ritual and human intelligence. Each piece of work is a complete narrative, opening out gradually and reaching (temporary) resolution. Every decision about which material to use, which shape to create, where to place a work, whether or how to photograph or record it, and how to think about the contradictions between the work and its reproduction (whether in the gallery or in this book) is a dramatic act that defines, dissolves and renews perception about the relationship between nature and culture.”

Kay Syrad, Chris Drury Silent Spaces, Thames and Hudson 1998