Rural Heritage August/September 2025

Installing an Earthwork

by Joe Mischka O n a rainy and windy day in early May, a group of teamsters began preparing the site for an earthwork project at the Illinois State University Horticulture Center in Normal, Ill. So, what's an earthwork? “An earthwork is a type of art that is made by shaping the land itself,” lead artist Ruth Burke said. “It is often using natural materials. They can be ephemeral, they can be durational, they can be hosted within museums and institutions, but they are most often outside. One of the most famous earthworks is Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty. And it's in Nevada’s Great Salt flat. But the earthwork that we are working is one of the only earthworks made

with animal traction. So to my knowledge, there are no other artists that are making earthworks using draft animal power.” Ruth explained that the installation they have begun working on in Normal, is the flagship in a series of earthworks. Two other, smaller, earthworks, one in Steuben, Wis., and another in Cochranville, Penn., complete the series. “And one of the shared characteristics of all these earthworks is not only the use of draft animal power in their fabrication, but also that they are all pollinator habitat and food source, which is really important to me as an artist when I think about the sort of footprint that I leave on the world. And in 2018, I started dreaming up these earthwork projects. I was working on a micro dairy and I really started to see

Ruth Burke leads Sparky and Clark put to a disk harrow after the ground had been plowed.

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