Christopher Kurtz
BADLANDS Installation, 2026
Claro Walnut, Walnut, Cottonwood, Cherry, Sapele, Oak, Basswood, Ash, Butternut, Sassafras, Cypress, Sycamore, Holly, Maple, Tulipwood Poplar, Wenge, Pine, Redwood and others
Varied sizes
Further images
Description
Words by Christopher Kurtz 2,500 hand-carved off-cuts from approximately two decades of studio practice. BADLANDS began with a simple act: carving stones from the remnants of my own studio. For nearly twenty years I kept offcuts from finished works—fragments of cherry, walnut, oak, ash, maple, sycamore, and basswood that had already lived another life as sculpture, furniture, maquettes, or experiments abandoned along the way. Rather than discard them, I began reshaping them into thousands of hand-carved wooden stones. The result is an imagined geology composed not of minerals but of accumulated decisions. Each stone carries its own biography: traces of earlier projects, failed ideas, moments of discovery, and years of labor compressed into a form that feels at once ancient and immediate. Taken together, they become a landscape of bundled histories. The title BADLANDS refers first to the landscape of western South Dakota, a place that shaped me long before I understood its influence. My father's family established Kurtz Signs there, painting roadside billboards, businesses, and tourist landmarks across the region, including signs for Wall Drug and along the roads leading toward the Badlands themselves. As a child I traveled there several times each year. The scale of that country—its eroded formations, impossible horizons, and the feeling of time made visible through geology—has never left me. But the title also speaks more broadly to land that is difficult to cross. Emotional landscapes. Historical landscapes. Periods of life that resist easy passage. BADLANDS was made during one of those periods, and the work became a way to think through grief, memory, inheritance, and change through the slow repetition of making. The stones occupy an unusual territory between artifact and landscape. They resemble river stones, skipping stones, markers, cairns, and tools, yet they belong fully to none of these categories. Their material further complicates the analogy. Geological stone records time through sediment and pressure. These wooden stones record time through growth rings, use, memory, and transformation. They are not imitations of geology so much as parallel forms of history. The installation itself remains deliberately unfinished. Visitors are invited to move the stones, build cairns, create desire lines, or carry individual pieces away. The landscape changes through participation. Nothing remains fixed. Authorship becomes shared and the work accumulates new histories as it travels. This idea of change has always felt close to a line attributed to Heraclitus: no one steps into the same river twice, because neither the river nor the person remains the same. BADLANDS operates in much the same way. Each installation is different. Each visitor alters the terrain. Each stone carries a past while remaining open to another future. What began as studio leftovers ultimately became a meditation on lineage—not simply family lineage, though that is present, nor solely artistic lineage, though that too matters—but the broader ways ideas, materials, memories, and gestures are carried forward. The landscape is made of countless individual histories gathered together, continuously rearranging themselves into something larger than any one part.1
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