Beverly Buchanan's Marsh Ruins Examined in New Afterall Publication

Afterall has released a new publication titled 'Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins' by Amelia Groom, offering an illustrated examination of Buchanan's 1981 environmental sculpture. The work consists of large mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete located in the Marshes of Glynn on the southeast coast of Georgia, existing in an ongoing state of ruination. Groom's text explores Buchanan's vision of sculptural ruination through ideas of witnessing, documentation, landscape, and cultural memory. The Marsh Ruins engage with land art and postminimalist sculpture while resisting conventional art world classifications. Buchanan's work makes abstract use of concrete forms to address colonialism's legacies of fracture and dislocation, as well as the effects of weather and time. The paperback edition (6 x 8.5 inches, 112 pages, 48 color illustrations) was published in 2019 for £14.95, with an e-book version released in 2021. The book is part of Afterall's One Work series, which includes titles on Sung Hwan Kim, Isa Genzken, Alfredo Jaar, and Donald Rodney.