bio
Liam Coughlin, born and raised in Townsend, MA, creates large-scale land-based site-specific artworks, sculpture, and multimedia installations using wood, stone, fire, charcoal, plaster, film, and photography that thematically engage ideas of temporality, religion, ritual, and human being’s symbiotic relationship with nature. He often incorporates open flames, burn-carving and charring as a technique to achieve an aesthetic balance between the controlled, structured form and the improvisational, free form gesture. Drawing inspiration from the early land art movements of the 20th century as well as mid-century surrealist experimental film art, Coughlin’s work incorporates a great deal of physical exertion and performance as he harvests large logs by hand and burns them over open fires before capturing these moments of transmutation through video and photography. His studio work and land art practice aim to invite the viewer to heighten their spatial awareness, contemplate their personal connection to the natural world and think critically about how that connection may serve as an intervention in or promotion of the natural spaces they experience regularly.
Coughlin is based between Waltham and Townsend, MA. In 2017, he received a BA in English from Brandeis University where he is currently pursuing a post-baccalaureate in fine art.
statement
My process-based art practice is driven by a fascination with the natural world: its constant state of change and our symbiotic relationship to it. Through site-specific land-based works, sculpture, and multimedia installation projects, I explore ideas of temporality and transformation in both the natural and built environment. I am captivated by the aesthetics of organic mechanisms (erosion, decay, growth) and the effect of human intervention (cutting, burning, digging, sanding, chipping, walking, raking, gathering) as an intentional artistic act.
Techniques for engaging materials emerge out of a process that feels almost religious: methodical and ritualistic. I walk around rings of burning logs tending to delicate fires; I walk the forest in search of branches, barks, logs—bowing in reverence to eternal structures rising up all around me. I feel like I’m paying homage to something that I don’t completely understand—or even wish to understand; but the mystique—the promise of being witness to transfiguration— draws me to materials and the process that follows. The resulting work is largely a reflection of these gestures performed throughout the artmaking process. This could be a group of burn-carved logs arranged in the forest to echo a long-forgotten religious gathering or a gallery installation consisting of a series of logs that have undergone numerous acts of preservation (charring, wrapping, painting, drying) carried out as a contemplation on my relationship with wood.
In this responsive way of making, I am able to examine and become acutely aware of how my physical body interacts with my natural surroundings. Viewing the landscape as a collaborator, I follow the will of materials in real time, as they respond to my manipulations and interventions, to discover a final form. Central to this process are critical questions about my coexistence with the land. I constantly pause to assess whether my body is interfering with the terrain or working with it in unison. I aim to have a grasp of the why or why not and the potential effects. How do I exist in relation to the eternal forces that surround me in these moments? How can I begin to comprehend how my actions have the ability to alter something that can potentially exist far longer than myself? Do I give this thought and these entities the respect they deserve? Ultimately, I hope the viewer is left with the same set of questions about and reverence for our ecological relationships.
Fire— a reoccurring formal and conceptual reductive measure throughout my work, represents the idea of human intervention in the natural world as an inciting incident to something far larger. The simple act of making a small incision into a piece of wood and sparking a small fire in that cut may seem insignificant at first but given time that small act creates something far more dramatic. My role as an instigator of action in this relationship is something that I hope the viewer considers in their own lives: to reflect on the small acts that humanity performs to expedite the destruction or alteration of the environment.