Project by Jason Minjian Li and Ellie Nolan
This project undertakes a critical examination of Nancy Holt’s Trail Markers series to uncover the hidden impacts of landscape interventions and alterations involved in creating and conserving picturesque and seemingly natural landscapes. Nancy Holt’s photo series, consisting of twenty archival inkjet prints, documents a trail between Two Bridges and Wistman’s Wood—a short stretch of publicly accessible footpath traversing the granite uplands of Dartmoor, England. By tracing the orange spray-painted marks on stones that subtly guide walkers, her work reveals how these landscapes are deeply entangled with human interventions, cultural permissions, and environmental manipulations. Building on this, our project uses a series of visualizations to further unravel layers of visual and territorial authorship embedded in Dartmoor’s terrain.
The expanded model and image interrogate how humans have historically constructed—and continue to construct—ways of seeing and shaping landscapes. Through carefully framed peepholes, viewers encounter curated scenes of the past, present, and speculative futures, foregrounding how access and exclusion are mediated over time. This dynamic invites reflection on the relational and often obscured dimensions of “nature” as both concept and space. Meanwhile, a scaled map encompassing Dartmoor as a whole juxtaposes official trail routes and urban-rural linkages with evidence of extraction, infrastructure, shifting legislation, and rerouted paths, exposing the environmental and political costs of access. Together, these representations critically engage with the climate impacts and visual ideologies embedded in landscape-making, challenging viewers to see trail markers not as passive navigational aids but as active agents of environmental, cultural, and legislative change.
