Thrown Ropes Remagen

Peter Hutchinson is one of the first »ecological aesthetes«. He has realised his largest and most complex ground installation to date on the Rhine meadows in Remagen. It forms part of the work group »Thrown Ropes«. For this purpose Hutchinson threw a ten-metre rope several times in order to obtain a number of more or less haphazard lines. These lines, which can be straight, intertwined or meandering, are planted with a carefully chosen selection of flowers and shrubs. According to season the plants marking the lines will be green, in flower or even disappear.

Following in the tradition of the American Land Art movement, Hutchinson views nature as a superordinated environment which he studies intensively. By means of careful interventions he re-designs this natural habitat, bringing it to life and therefore making us »aware« of it once more.

In Hutchinson's working processes, as in nature, coincidences and ecologically ideal conditions play a very important part. This is much in evidence in his work for the Riverside Sculpture Park in Remagen. The rows of flowers and plants are as irregular as cracks in the Earth: not geometric, as we know them from domestic gardens. The forms appear to have grown naturally and not to have been determined artificially according to a fixed pattern. Following the annual pattern of the seasons, the forms come into view or disappear again.

Peter Hutchinson was born in London in 1930, he lives and works in Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA.