This contribution explores the creation of an artistic earthwork to both reflect and commemorate a cultural landscape that has been shaped by change over time and by continual evolution. Ellen Martine Heuser shares her creative process behind Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland (2023), an artwork that seeks to uncover the deep, layered histories embedded within the remnants of Danish heathland landscapes. These histories were formed through intricate relationships between humans, soil, plants, and animals. Through this process, Heuser discovered that truly understanding the heathland requires reciprocity; one must give something of oneself in return. She describes how, to deepen this connection, she spent a summer immersed in the heathlands – herding sheep, engaging with locals, and exploring the heather-covered terrain.

Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland, Fragment 2 (2023). (Photo: Tina Sørensen)
What is an Earthwork?
An earthwork in the context of modern and contemporary art is a form of art created using materials sourced from a specific landscape, as well as situated within it. Emerging from the late 1960s Land Art movement, earthworks involve artistic interventions with specific landscapes or soils, blurring the boundaries between the artwork and its natural surroundings. Unlike traditional sculptures, earthworks are inherently site-specific, as their relationship with their environment is integral to their meaning and experience. Earthworks often have ephemeral qualities. Subject to weathering and other natural forces, they transform over time, eventually eroding or dissolving like any other part of the landscape. Additionally, their lifespan may be influenced by external factors, such as landowners requesting their removal shortly after their creation. As a result, documentation – through photographs or film – has become a vital means of preserving and sharing these works.
How did your collaboration with ANTHEA start, and what was your relationship to the heathlands prior to the project?
During my stay as artist-in-residence on the island of Læsø, I received a phone call from Mette Løvschal, who asked me if I would be interested in making an artistic contribution to her research project on heathlands, ANTHEA. It was October 2022, and I had just spent the past weeks making an earthwork on Læsø. After the phone conversation, with soil still stuck under my fingernails, I started to think about making an earthwork in the heathlands, and I began the search for a location where I could acquire the necessary permission to dig.
(Photos: Ellen Martine Heuser)
I knew little about heathlands as cultural landscapes. I grew up in Copenhagen and this type of landscape had never been a part of my immediate surroundings. I soon learned that maintaining the heathlands depends on a continuous, conscious interaction between humans, animals, insects, plants, and other beings. This led me to understand the heathlands as a perpetual manifestation of the dynamic interplay between all these agents.
With this in mind, I realized that one, solitary, earthwork in one location would not fully embody my project. A more fragmented work seemed relevant for commemorating the sporadic, remaining heathlands still existing today, and I started searching for several sites to work with. In the end, the earthwork Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland (2023) ended up taking shape in three locations: one on the island of Læsø, and two in Jutland.
As your title indicates, your work is also a memorial. What does a memorial mean to you and how is it embedded in your earthwork?
A memorial can be defined as a sculpture commemorating something or someone which has been. In my own practice, I have learned that earthworks are always in some way a memorial, because of their site-specific intention and their marking of place.
The American art critic and theorist Rosalind E. Krauss’s description of earthworks have been an essential inspiration to me and this project. In a text from 1979, Krauss writes:
And so we stare at the pit in the earth and think we both do and don’t know what sculpture is. Yet I would submit that we know very well what sculpture is. And one of the things we know is that it is a historically bounded category and not a universal one. (…) The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place. ( 1 )
Krauss 1979, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 31–44.
In earthworks, the “sculpture” is inseparable from the specific location it is created into. These works have the potential to embody and evoke the deep, often ambiguous histories embedded in the site. For me, an earthwork becomes a kind of memorial, bringing forgotten or layered memories from the past to the surface.
Initially, the earthwork was intended to be a site-specific heathwork that exposed the sediments or processes of the heathland’s geological being (e.g. the allag and the heather root system), which are not always visible to the human eye. When the cultivation of the heathlands began, that infamous sediment left behind by the podsolization or extreme leaching of the soil, in Danish called allag, was ruptured by humans to make it possible for crops to thrive on the soil. My first idea was to position my work in a place where the allag had never been ruptured.
As I delved deeper into the complexity of the heathland soil – its landscape, its layered history and its human interventions – I sought for ways the earthwork could remain open to contemporary interpretations. I wanted it to function as a memorial that not only marks this moment in time, but also honours the ongoing interspecies processes it is part of. My aim was for the work to exist as a “being–becoming,” reflecting the physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s assertion that “[...] ‘histories’ do not happen in time, rather, are indeterminate ma(r)kings of time.”
( 2 )
Barad 2012, “On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1),” 13
Searching for a title to capture this, I recalled an essay by the Danish poet Inger Christensen, which ends with the lines:
Verden ønsker at se sig selv. – Og må derfor synliggøre, ikke sig selv, men sin væremåde i menneskets drømme:
Et landskab bæres frem i en skål; hvis du drikker denne ørken, disse begyndende sandbjerge, skal du aldrig tørste. ( 3 )
Christensen 2018 (1978), “Verden ønsker at se sig selv,” 821–22.[The world wants to see itself. – And must therefore make visible not itself, but its way of appearing in human dreams.
A landscape brought forth in a bowl: these emerging mountains of sand, you shall never thirst.] ( 4 )
Translation by Bradley Harmon, published in The Cincinnati Review, 2024.
The title of the earthwork revealed itself: Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland (Mindesmærke der afslører sin væren i heden). While the memorial already exists in the landscape, my work acts as a ma(r)king of time, making it visible and unveiling its being.
How did you start the project?
Initially, I reached out to a few heathland associations in Germany, where I was living at the time, to request permission to create an earthwork in the areas they managed. I received no replies. It quickly became clear to me that proposing to dig an artistic earthwork in a protected landscape is no simple task. However, in January 2023, I finally received a phone call granting permission to dig a 100 x 100 x 100 cm sondage in Læsø Klitplantage – outside the Natura 2000 area.
The permission came with several conditions. I had to ensure that no animals would be trapped, and I had to refill the sondage immediately after documenting the work, and return the sediments in the same order as they were removed. Crucially, I was informed that, due to the island’s geological age, the layer of allag was unlikely to be present in the soil on Læsø. Despite this, I proceeded to create the first part of the earthwork.
You have mentioned how the engagement with the landscape in which the earthworks are actualized is an important part of the work. How did you in your project engage with the heathland and the humans, animals, and plants that live there?
I connected with the geographer and writer Emmy Laura Pérez Fjalland, who has been engaging with heathlands for years through her project Herding Heathlands. She put me in touch with Berit Kiilerich, a shepherdess from west Jutland.
I reached out to Berit to ask if she knew of a heathland where I could dig. She invited me to visit her farm, and a few weeks later I found myself on a train from Berlin to Jutland. Together, we drove to Præstbjerg Naturcenter, a heathland she has managed for the past decade through grazing with sheep and controlled burning. As we walked across the snow-covered landscape, we discussed the possibilities of creating an earthwork here. Berit suggested I contact Herning municipality to request permission to dig.
Before we returned to her pickup, she mentioned that if I wanted to better understand the heathland, I could come back in the summer and herd her sheep. I noticed her looking at me curiously and soon realized why. She added that herding sheep requires someone who isn’t too lightweight – strong winds in the open landscape could easily blow you away, she said.
Some months later, Berit asked if I had decided whether I wanted to herd her sheep that summer. I was still unsure, but intrigued by the possibility of finding a heathland with unruptured allag to dig into. So I said yes.
Berit suggested I first visit the North Frisian island of Sylt, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where a colleague could teach me mobile fencing techniques and shepherding with a breed of sheepdog known as Old German. On the heathlands of Sylt I was taught traditional skills, walking with the sheep through the heather and along the beach in both sunshine and pouring rain. I couldn’t help but wonder how, in just seven months, my journey had taken me from planning an earthwork on Læsø to herding sheep on Sylt.
That summer, I arrived at Berit´s farm. She drove me to an organic free-range pig farm near the heathland where her sheep graze. There I met the pig farmers, Inger and Poul, and we asked if they knew of a place nearby I could live for the summer. Despite being a native speaker, I struggled to understand their accent. What I did gather was that they did not have a spare room for me at that time.
We visited the neighbouring farm, where Inger’s sister Eva lives with her husband Flemming, both also organic free-range pig farmers. Until then, I had rarely seen a pig in real life, let alone visited a large-scale pig farm. We asked if they might have a place for me to stay. I ended up in a small cabin on their privately owned land, nested beside a burial mound. The cabin had no electricity or running water, but it became my home until the end of the summer.
Over time, I learned more about the history of the area and the farms. Eva and Flemming explained that heathlands had once stretched all over the fields now used for agriculture and livestock. The heather had stretched out as far as the eye could see. Nearby, around the heathlands of Tihøje, it’s still possible to get a sense of how this might have looked.
When I asked them if they knew where I could find the allag, they weren’t sure, but gave me permission to conduct a sondage in a plantation on their farm, which had once been heathland. What I uncovered there was not unruptured allag, but I did encounter a podsolization sediment unlike anything I had seen on Læsø or Hvolris.

(Photo: Ellen Martine Heuser)
I slowly learned to herd 370 sheep with the border collie, Lyka. Most days I wandered with the sheep from morning to evening across the heathlands of Præstbjerg, observing how families, children, and older people interacted with the landscape.
One morning, Flemming sent me a text: Heavy rain is coming. Do not go out today. Scared of failing to live up to the role of being a shepherd, I decided to go out with the sheep anyway – it couldn’t possibly be worse than the rain I’d endured on Sylt.
But as the rain poured down, the sheep scattered. I shouted commands to Lyka and the sheep, straining to be heard in the strong wind. Alone in the open landscape, with no one but the dog and the sheep, my shouting turned to screaming, then to crying. Exhaustion gripped the sheep, the dog, and me. The rain had soaked three raincoats, rain pants, and rubber boots. Finally, I sank to my knees, sobbing, overwhelmed and perplexed. And then, as if by some quiet agreement, the sheep slowly gathered in front of me, beginning to ruminate. In that moment, I felt the weight and rhythm of something ancient – both humbling and strangely affirming.
How did your stay on the heathlands influence the final work, and what did you learn from the process?
Uncovering the last fragment, I realized I would never have been granted permission to dig or excavate in the heathlands without also giving something back to the landscape – without taking the time to intimately know it. As Berit had told me during our first meeting, “If you want to know the heathland, you can come and live here for the summer.” She had known it all along. You have to give something of yourself to the heathland, for it to reveal itself to you.
My initial search for the allag in west Jutland was a utopian quest for an untouched image of the heathland – a sediment formed by nature before the Anthropocene. Instead, I uncovered ruptured sediments that told the story of the human interaction with the landscape.




Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland, Fragment 1
Location: Enebærdalen, Læsø Klitplantage, Læsø, Denmark
Landscape: Heathland
Dimension: 100 x 100 x 100 cm
(Photos: Ellen Martine Heuser)
Fragment 1
Læsø, April 2023
Læsø is an island located in the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden. Rising from the sea around 3000 BC, the island sank between the waves in 1700 BC, only to re-emerge in 700 BC.
When I received permission to dig a 100 x 100 x 100 cm sondage by hand in Læsø Klitplantage, I was advised to bring a drainage pump in case the groundwater rose. I was also provided with a map marking three potential excavation sites. Upon visiting these locations, I found the first location already flooded by groundwater. I selected the second site, where the heather grew tall. But when I arrived next day to begin work, the road to the site was blocked because of construction. This led me to the third location, which I later learned was called Enebærdalen, the juniper valley.
As I excavated the sondage, a local geologist stopped by to observe my process. He kindly explained to me the layers I had uncovered: the topsoil consisted of heather peat (5–12 cm), underlain by drifting sand from the past millennium, shaped by land uplifts and dune formations. About 50 cm down, a former topsoil horizon became visible, resting above a beach formation from the youngest Bronze Age. What is now the island’s interior was once a cape. Læsø has grown over the millennia, and is continuing to expand today.



Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland, Fragment 2
Location: Skulpturlunden, Hvolris Jernalderlandsby, Viborg, Denmark
Landscape: Former heathland
Dimension: 50 x 500 x 600 cm
(Photos: Tina Sørensen)
Fragment 2
Hvolris, April 2023
In Hvolris, a prehistoric site near Skals Ådal in Jutland, two Bronze Age burial mounds stand close to an Iron Age stone circle and the remnants of a settlement from the same period. This is known as Hvolris Iron Age Village (Hvolris Jernalderlandsby) and is part of Viborg Museum. Heather grows sporadically here, amid a curve primarily of grassland with grazing sheep and goats. On a nearby hill, a contemporary sculpture grove has been cultivated. Unlike my main site on Læsø, no heather grows there, and the area is surrounded by a plantation. I was told that this landscape was once heathland.
Unlike on Læsø, where I had to adhere to specific dimensions for the excavation due to the site’s protected heathland status, no such restrictions applied here. This land is registered not as heathland but as a sculpture park, Skulpturlunden. My original intention was to shape this second part of the earthwork to match the dimensions of the first – 100 x 100 x 100 cm. However, conversations with the volunteers from the museum led me to reconsider.
The volunteers introduced me to a significant piece of jewellery connected to the museum: a brooch made from bronze and silver and dating back to around 600 AD. Its ornamentation features what is believed to be a double-headed snake. Discovered by a local volunteer excavating near Hvolris Jernalderlandsby in the 1960s, the exact location and year of the find remain unknown. Today, a replica of the brooch is on display in the museum, and its ornamentation has been adopted as the museum’s logo. Inspired by this piece and recalling Krauss’s reflections on sculpture and form, I decided to adapt the brooch’s core shape for this second part of the earthwork.
While working on my earthwork, I uncovered several notable features. In the topsoil layer, which extended about 40 cm, I found multiple flint fragments. Beneath this layer, sand appeared, interspersed with numerous stones measuring 10–15 cm in diameter, additional pieces of flint, and plant stems. I had been informed that the site was once heathland. However, when I later examined an eighteenth-century historical map in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters,
( 5 )
GIS mapping of the Danish heathlands by Mark Haughton, based on a 1768–1805 map in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (Videnskabernes Selskab).
I realized that the earthwork’s location lies on the border between what was once heathland and an area that had already been converted into farmland at that time.





Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland, Fragment 3
Location: Præstbjerg Naturcenter, Herning, Denmark
Landscape: Heathland
Dimension: 50 x 6000 cm
(Photos: Tina Sørensen)
Fragment 3
Præstbjerg, September 2023
Three days before leaving Præstbjerg, I noticed the sheep eating in a spot we had not used before. I sat down on a small plateau I had walked past daily but had never paid much attention to. Scraping away some loose soil from the edge of the plateau, I noticed signs of podsolization. Curious as to whether this might be the allag, I contacted Herning municipality again, this time requesting permission to remove the loose outer layer of the profile using a handheld tool. A few weeks later, I received permission expose the profile. Returning to west Jutland with a trowel, I uncovered a 60-metre-wide section of the profile. This became the third and final part of my earthwork.
Examining the sediment afterwards, I found myself puzzled. Why was there no layer of humus? And more urgently, what had created this plateau in the landscape? When I asked Poul, he explained that in the 1950s, the land had belonged to a farmer who ploughed it regularly. Later, it was sold to Herning municipality and transformed into a recreational area. Had I stumbled upon an intact allag, or was it, instead, a seventy-year-old plough mark in land that had been restored to heathland? Either way, this fragment endures as a commemorative representation of the landscape’s layered history.
(Photos: Ellen Martine Heuser)
Fragment X
The second time I met Berit, she handed me a piece of hard matter she had found at a construction site near a heathland called Vind Hede. It was a dark, heavy object, fitting almost perfectly in the palm of my hand. We both wondered if it could be a fragment of allag. Unsure of its origins, we joked that it might be a meteorite – an earthly time-travelling meteorite once born from the heathland itself. Later, I asked Inger and Poul’s sons if they had ever seen such a “meteorite” before and whether they thought it could be allag. They said no, but suggested it might be bog iron. Bog iron is a naturally occurring form of iron found in wetlands, formed when iron-rich groundwater interacts with oxygen and organic material, leaving deposits in the soil.
I wondered whether this “meteorite” – or piece of bog iron – had left a depression in the soil in which it once lay. An empty space in the landscape, a Fragment X, mirroring the dimension of my hand.
I thought of the countless hands that, over millennia, have tended to the commons of the northern European heathlands. And I thought of the far fewer hands caring for the heathlands today, and how this fragment, held in mine, might carry a memory of their labour, endurance, and care.
Memorial That Unveils Its Being in the Heathland (Mindesmærke der afslører sin væren i heden) (2023) is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and the Grosserer L. F. Foghts Foundation. Permissions were granted by the Danish Nature Agency, Læsø Kunst og Kultur, Hvolris Jernalderlandsby (Hvolris Iron Age Village), Foreningen Hvolris Venner (Friends of Hvolris Association), and Herning municipality. The work was facilitated with support from Lystbækgaard, Ingridsboplads, Sønder Klejnstrup, Fonagergaard, Studio Bovbjerg, Danish Art Workshops and Moesgaard Museum.
Barad, K. (2012). On touching: The inhuman that therefore I am (v1.1). Reprinted in Witzgall, S., & Stakemeier, K. (Eds.), Power of material/politics of materiality, Chicago, Diaphanes, 2017.
- Krauss 1979, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 31–44. ↑