Maya Lin

Systematic Landscapes

Maya Lin

In her large-scale environmental artworks, Maya Lin has consistently explored how we experience and relate to the landscape. From her recent works such as Where the Land Meets the Sea (2008, a drawing in space based upon the topology of the San Francisco Bay) Eleven Minute Line (2004, an earthen line 1600 feet long by 12 feet high, traversing a meadow in Sweden) and Flutter (2005, a 20,000 square foot sculpted earthwork commissioned for a federal courthouse in Miami) back to her very first—the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, where she cut open the land and polished its edges to create a history embedded in the earth—she has made works that merge completely with the terrain, blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and setting up a systematic ordering of the land that is tied to history, time, and language.
Corcoran Gallery of Art