Arguably one of the most influential artists in the land, earth movement, Alan Sonfist uncovers the natural past of urban cities to revitalize and restore ecological systems stressed by urbanization. Born in New York City’s South Bronx near the hemlock forest, Sonfist witnessed the forest’s deforestation as well as those attempting to save it. The incident gave Sonfist an early realization of the fragility and temporal characteristics of nature, a motif stressed in his throughout work.

Sonfist gained considerable attention with his work “Time Landscape”, a micro-forest in downtown Manhattan consisting of pre-colonial foliage. This work was meant to show the area as it had existed before drastic human intervention. Juxtaposing the surrounding modern landscape, the forest asks the viewer to consider what is natural, the preexisting. Throughout his work, Sonfist considers his subjects in an archeological and ethnographical manner. His intention is to dig up the past and expose it in the present so viewers can gain deeper awareness of nature’s delicate and dynamic existence. Sonfist’s work is simultaneously historical and fantastical. In his on-site work “Circles of Time” in Tuscany, Sonfist uses three inner rings to reconstruct a primeval forest, surrounded by a layer of thyme, and finally a ring of wheat and olive trees. Each layer of this work represents a time period of the Tuscan land, with the innermost layer calling back to the land’s origins and Greek and Roman gods, while the outermost ring represents the lands current agricultural role. Sonfist’s sculptures function as to recontextualize an environment outside of the constricts of time. Through intense research, Sonfist captures accuracies of the past, but as his work exists in the context of the present environment, it yields a complex dialogue between nature’s impartial presence and society’s repercussions and vision for the environment.