If you were a land artist in the 1960s and 70s, the recipe was simple: find a dramatically remote patch of desert or riverbank, build something monumentally oversized, and let nature do the rest. Nancy Holt, one of the few women who got to play in that particular sandbox, followed the formula to a T - and now, at long last, the UK is giving her a solo show.
The exhibition, currently running at the Goodwood Art Foundation in Sussex, features Holt's most famous work, Sun Tunnels, which she installed in the Utah desert back in 1976. The piece consists of four concrete cylinders, each precisely aligned so that the sun and stars perform a daily light show through their openings. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder whether Holt was an artist, an astronomer, or just someone who really, really liked concrete.
But the show's curators have a surprise up their sleeve: the most important piece in the exhibition isn't a 20-ton tube of aggregate and rebar. It's a small sheet of paper, measuring just 30cm by 45cm, hanging quietly on a gallery wall. On it is a concrete poem - a circle surrounded by the words "MOONSUNSTAR EARTHSKYWATER" - that somehow encapsulates Holt's entire cosmic preoccupation in a format you could easily mistake for a doodle.
Holt, who died in 2014, spent her career exploring the systems that underpin the Earth and the cosmos, often by plonking enormous things in the middle of nowhere. It's a fitting legacy for an artist who apparently believed that if you're going to contemplate the universe, you might as well do it from inside a concrete tunnel in Utah.