Thrown Rope - Couverture souple

Although Peter Hutchinson has been working with land art since the 1960s, he has yet to receive his proper due. His work isn't found in galleries and he doesn t practice the kind of sensationalism that is typical of the art world. He is a refreshingly modest artist, and his delicate, fleeting work is extraordinarily beautiful, remarkably intelligent, and endlessly charming. It is our hope that Thrown Rope will place Hutchinson where he belongs: in the canon of modern art alongside Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson.

Hutchinson's works are ephemeral and evanescent, produced out in the open, where they are subject to the whims of nature. Much of it is the product of his 'thrown rope' method literally throwing ropes over an expanse of land, then placing lime or planting flowers along the lines deter-mined by the ropes. The result is a snakelike garden or swerving lines of bleached land. Hutchinson has even thrown ropes underwater, planting flowers at the bottom of a lake or stringing oranges or onions beneath the water's surface.

Such projects are just a slice of Hutchinson's many conceptual pieces. The photographs within Thrown Rope are all that exists to document Hutchinson's career. Reproduced here along with Hutchinson's own hand-written notes, they provide an inspirational look at one of the most underappreciated artists of our time.

Peter Hutchinson has been making art since the 1960s in locations around the world, from the top of a volcano in Mexico to the bottom of the sea in Greece. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Bill Beckley is an artist who has exhibited widely in America and Europe since 1970. He teaches semiotics and film at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Carter Ratcliff is an award winning art critic and contributing editor to Art in America . He is the author of Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965 1975 , The Figure of the Artist (essays), and The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art . He lives in North Miami Beach, Florida.