Cornelia Konrads’ Incredible Land Art Installations Hover Above the Landscape

Cornelia Konrads <a href="http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/04/gravity-defying-land-art-by-cornelia-konrads/">Land Art installations</a> have floated over natural landscapes across the world. Seeming to defy gravity, the works by the German-based artist use materials found within those landscapes, such as rocks and branches, to form <a href="http://www.cokonrads.de">installations which strike an ambivalent pose</a>, caught in the midst of a skyward ascension or a downward accumulation. Suspended in time, the works provide a peaceful, contemplative interaction between nature and man-made culture while forming a bridge of mythic other-worldliness between the two.

Konrads works in the field of artists such as <a title="Andy Goldsworthy’s ‘Wood Line’ Installation Made From Fallen Trees Snakes Through the Presidio" href="http://inhabitat.com/andy-goldsworthys-wood-line-installation-made-from-fallen-trees-snakes-through-the-presidio/">Andy Goldsworthy</a> and <a title="Rob Mullholland’s Mysterious Mirror Sculptures Reflect the Forest Around Them" href="http://inhabitat.com/rob-mullhollands-mysterious-mirror-sculptures-reflect-the-forest-around-them/">Rob Mullholland</a>, responding to nature by presenting a way for the viewer, or more commonly, visitor, to reexamine their relationship to place through site-specific installations.

Gateways feature heavily within Konrads' work -&nbsp;<em>Passage</em>, installed in a forest clearing in Germany, provides a literal pathway back into nature. Returning cut-down branches to the cleared area, Konrads provides a direct, graceful and yet playful link between our own interventions into nature and the beauty of the nearby untouched wilderness.

Meanwhile <em>The Gate</em> reclaimed two posts, denoting an abandoned entrance way in France by surrounding them with found rocks. As they ascend, the rocks transform the entrance from a regular man-made structure into something altogether more ethereal.

Piles..." is a <a href="http://www.cokonrads.de/about/about02.html">series of installations whose visual impact</a> is drawn from "the pleas and prayers of people in Asia who raise cones of wishing stones, a shamanic custom that is older than Buddhism." Here Konrads integrates a more focused sense of hope into the reformation of found natural objects and their surroundings.

Some of Konrads' pieces provide a further layer of ambivalence —&nbsp; <em>Le Mur (2006)</em> presents either the possibility of an entrance or the removal of a path, depending upon one's interpretation of the direction of the suspended rocks. Similar gravity-defying installations are featured prominently throughout Konrads' <a href="http://www.cokonrads.de/situ/site.html">significant portfolio of work</a>.

More recent installations provide novel ways for us to reconsider our own environment - like her dramatic, if somewhat comical <a href="http://www.360cities.net/image/schleudersitz-cornelia-konrads#358.80,10.90,70.0">slingshot composed of a large wishbone-shaped tree branch and a regular park bench.</a>