Lisa Hirmer
DIRT PILES collected thoughts on the landscape of construction
landscape | displacement by lisa hirmer
ground earth-moving plants instability surplus
For some time now I have been photographing dirt piles – the sizable mounds of earth, stone, torn apart trees, old and new vegetation, lost bricks and bits of asphalt that are informally piled up next to almost every construction site over a certain size. Once I began to look for them, it became apparent that large dirt piles are a rather common presence in the contemporary landscape. Any time I drive through a suburban, or semi-urban area, which is to say any place where the built is claiming new land, dirt piles appear in abundance. It is easy to predict where big, spectacular dirt piles will show up. They are the result of site grading – a process of adjusting topography to suit new plans. As earth is reshaped, extra material is piled up and left somewhere out of the way until a use for it is found or it is moved somewhere else, perhaps dissipating from consciousness but not from physical presence. This means they are almost certain around any project that requires substantial site grading to ensure even, opportune sites with good water drainage – big box stores, industrial parks and new subdivisions are prime habitats for a good dirt pile. I photograph the dirt piles because they, like most landscapes, are complicated. The etymology of the word landscape comes from the concept of a defined administrative unit of land, indicating that landscape is a combination of physical matter and how we understand that matter. The word was introduced into modern
English usage with the Dutch landscape painting tradition, again an indication that it is not just the terrain of the world but rather that terrain as well as the frame placed around it . The photograph, like the landscape, walks the line between matter and idea. It is both document and creation – it records the material realm and transcends it simultaneously. With a photograph the messy intricacy and banality of the dirt piles can be documented and layered against the creative faculty of an image. Photographing the dirt piles is, then, a way to study them. Dirt piles are often large, sometimes looming. Some are short- lived, only present during part of the construction process; others seem to be more enduring, lingering in fields behind completed projects, seemingly temporary even after years of being there as though awaiting an inevitable expansion of the built worlds they sit beside. The dirt piles are both relics of the landscape that used to be and measures of the forces of technology, industry and economy that make the large-scale reshaping of terrain possible. The dirt pile points both to what once was and the act that changed it. They are littered with evidence of former landscapes, fragments that suggest what might have happened on the site at earlier times, occasionally even hinting at possible narratives. Across them run tire tracks imprinted with fresh additions and backhoe gouges where material has been reclaimed – traces of recent but unseen human activity, suggesting other, more contemporary stories.
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