For most artists, thinking big means hiring a larger studio. For the contemporary Welsh land artist Dafydda ap Gruffydd, it means proposing a tunnel between Wales and North America.
Her latest work, AmeriTunnel, is perhaps the most ambitious piece of land art conceived in Britain since someone first looked at a hillside and thought, “That would be improved with a giant horse carved into it.”
The proposal is disarmingly simple. A tunnel would leave Fishguard in West Wales, disappear beneath the Atlantic Ocean and emerge somewhere on the eastern seaboard of North America. Current negotiations are said to favour Boston, although discussions remain ongoing with several possible landing points. As with all great works of art, the exact destination is less important than the journey.
Ap Gruffydd describes the work as both sculpture and infrastructure; a conceptual artwork measured not in metres but in continents.
The project has inevitably invited comparisons with the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who spent much of his career proving that impossible ideas merely required enough brick, iron and determination. Historians may point out that Brunel never actually proposed tunnelling beneath the Atlantic but admirers of AmeriTunnel counter that he almost certainly would have, had someone made the tunnel machinery strong enough back then.
‘It’s just a longer Eurotunnel,’ the artist has said, ‘If anyone says it’s impossible I point out the success of that tunnel. And that is to France!’
Whether AmeriTunnel ultimately becomes a railway or a road tunnel remains deliberately unresolved. The answer, ap Gruffydd insists, depends entirely on funding. A train tunnel possesses an undeniable nineteenth-century romance, while a road tunnel better reflects humanity’s enduring belief that every problem can be solved by adding another lane.
Unlike most contemporary artworks, AmeriTunnel exists simultaneously as an engineering proposal, a philosophical enquiry and an invitation to ask, “How will this affect the tourism market”
Perhaps that ambiguity is precisely the point. Land art has always challenged our assumptions about scale. Richard Long walked across landscapes. Christo wrapped coastlines. Michael Heizer moved mountains. Ap Gruffydd merely asks whether distance is really anything to get hung up about nowadays.
A GoFundMe campaign will shortly be launched to assist with the project’s early fundraising. Initial costs include feasibility studies, geological surveys, transatlantic diplomacy, several sharpened pencils and, eventually, rather more concrete than is traditionally associated with the fine arts.
Should the full vision be realised, travellers may one day board a train in Fishguard and emerge in North America having spent the journey beneath three thousand miles of Atlantic seabed. If funding falls slightly short, there remains every possibility that the project will become the world’s most thought-provoking cul-de-sac.
Either way, AmeriTunnel promises to remind us that the difference between visionary engineering and contemporary art has always been little more than confidence, planning permission and an exceptionally optimistic budget.