Wild land

Oct. 20—Marguerite Humeau had done her research from afar.

She spent two years researching the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado, and her designs for a monumental land art project had gone through a number of changes. Only once she began installing her art did she truly began to see it for the first time: The wide open and flat expanse with mountains off in the distance; burrowing creatures sticking up their heads and quickly disappearing; windstorms appearing on the horizon and dancing asymmetrically before collapsing.

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Orisons sits on 160 acres of land privately owned by Jones Organic Farms. The site is open daily from sunrise to sunset, but reservations are closed during the winter months. Visitors can make reservations at orisons .as.me/schedule.php. Find more information at orisons.art.

This is not just a wildly beautiful place, thought Humeau, of the area around Hooper, Colorado, a small town in San Luis Valley about 24 miles west of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. This is a place that may hold lessons for all of humanity.

"I wanted to celebrate the land I had been introduced to as being a desolate piece of land with weeds and invasive species," says Humeau, the creator of Orisons, an art installation on 160 acres of Hooper farmland. "As I was exploring and bringing in experts to tell me about the soil, the wildlife, and plants, I was realizing this land is full of nomadic life. We can learn so much from the plants there. They live without a lot of water in very harsh circumstances; extreme wind, extreme cold, extreme everything. In a way, it's like a portal to what's going to be happening on Earth. We have to learn to be resilient."

Orisons, which opened last July, will be on display through June 30, 2025. Humeau, a French visual artist who was living in London, had never worked on such a large-scale project before. Her domain was mostly in museum exhibits, and she had come to the New Museum in New York with Birth Canal, an installation centered on the origins of humankind, in 2018. That's where she came to the attention of Cortney Lane Stell, the chief curator and executive director of Black Cube, a Denver-based nonprofit nomadic art museum that specializes in creating site-specific contemporary art installations centered in the public realm.

Stell cold-called the artist to gauge her interest in doing a land art project, with Humeau's artistic statement being to bring attention to climate change and the dramatically increasing scarcity of water. Together they began seeking a location that could be transformed into art.

"I saw her exhibition at the New Museum in New York and was really amazed at her ability to take over space in a haunting and mystical way," Stell says. "I spent time researching her practice, and she had done a lot of large exhibitions at museums. I saw two things: her ability to transform an environment into this wider narrative that she was concocting in her head and also her ability to work with large institutions and take on logistically complex projects."

The area they decided on was the San Luis Valley, which is the largest alpine valley in the world and the highest-altitude desert in North America. Situated about 160 miles north of Santa Fe, the valley averages fewer than 10 inches of rainfall per year and an average altitude of about 7,600 feet.

Eventually, Black Cube found the Orisons venue by making a deal with Jones Farms Organics — a fourth-generation, family-owned organic potato farm — to stage an installation on an unused crop circle. The art exhibit could remain on-site through 2025, giving it plenty of time to make a statement.

Humeau began planning for her huge earthwork. She made sketches and considered how the art would tie into the land and consulted local residents and artists.

That process went on for months before Humeau had an epiphany.

"At first, I was like, it's land art; I need to do something visible from the sky," she says. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Marguerite, you've been thinking about this upside down. Why do you want to have a grand gesture? Why do you want it to be seen from the sky? Why do you want to destroy the land? That's the opposite of what you're trying to achieve.' My mind switched, and I thought, 'The land is the work. It's a circle. It has a strong shape. It connects to sacred architecture like Stonehenge or other ancient human constructions.'"

Humeau began thinking of her pieces as subtle acupuncture needles that would touch the land therapeutically without damaging it. She spoke to geomancers and soil experts and began fashioning pieces to honor local wildlife species such as sandhill cranes that migrate through the valley.

Humeau wanted her project to endure wind and snow, but she also wanted it to have a small carbon footprint. The best art she could make, she says, was art that complemented the land without permanent alterations.

"The wind is the artwork. The sand is the artwork," she says of the installation. "The plants are the artwork. The sandhill cranes. The kangaroo rats. The dust devils. They are all the artwork. When we look around us, we don't see everything. You may have a dandelion growing on your balcony, and you might not even notice it because it doesn't belong in your space or in your imagination. With Orisons, I think my role has been to really think about how we can use poetry to transform land into an artwork simply by telling stories about it and revealing it to some eyes that haven't seen it before or have seen it only in a certain way. My job is to shift this vision and celebrate it for what it is."

'Infinite net of life'

The final installation includes a few 84 sculptures, some of them small and others resembling giant rope hammocks staked to metal support structures. Heart shapes abound, some of them silver and angled to reflect the sun. Bright colors are common, too, destined to develop a dusty patina over time.

The best part, Humeau says, was coming to Colorado for the installation. She spent three weeks in Hooper and made friends in the community, many of whom consulted or helped her. They counseled her that the weather would wreak havoc on her creations; nothing lasts for long in the San Luis Valley, and an art exhibit surviving for two years would be a challenge. She's not sure if she'll need to come back to touch up the work.

The Jones family, she says, was especially helpful, especially Rob Jones, the owner of Jones Organic Farms. He was there every day Humeau was there early on to answer questions or just to show that he was invested in the project.

"At first he was a bit curious about why we would spend so much time on this piece of land," she says. "It was quite funny to have this team of guys — some from France or England — coming all this way and spending three weeks in the desert. Rob was finding it quite amusing, but then he understood we were truly in love with it. My friends were trying to look for wildlife, trying to photograph rabbits or kangaroo rats. But we don't really know these animals; we don't have them in Europe. So we'd be showing the photos to Rob, and Rob would help us identify what they were. This relationship developed where you could see that all of us were really discovering what the land had to offer together."

The name of the installation is a play on words in Humeau's native French. The word pays tribute to the word horizon, of course, but Humeau says that the O in Orisons comes from the French word "orée," which means to be on the edge or the periphery. The Hooper site, she says, seems like it is on the cusp of another world. It's pitch-black at night due to local ordinances, and when you're out there alone, Humeau says you feel like you're part of a "huge and infinite net of life in all directions."

After she was finished, Humeau spoke with the owners of Jones Organic Farms, who asked her what she had learned.

"For me, it's a lesson of humility," she says. "When I was installing, I found a skeleton of a cow that had died alone. There would be a huge dust storm that would come in like a wave, strong and enveloping, something nobody could resist. At times, it would be so hot and there wouldn't be any shade. I wanted to be there because I wanted to know what it would be like for the plants and structural elements. I wanted to know what they go through. I wanted to become the work and merge with it. You realize life is really transient there."