Tatiana Bilbao Builds Rammed-Earth Crosses at Art Omi, Designed to Crumble

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio has installed four shoulder-high rammed-earth crosses at Art Omi, the New York arts centre — and the work is designed to decay over roughly two years.

The installation, titled Borrowed Earth, stands in the sculpture park at Art Omi's campus in Ghent, New York, which spans 120 acres. Each form consists of compacted soil harvested from the Hudson Valley area. A shorter cross sits at the centre and functions as a bench, surrounded by the taller columns.

The Mexico-based practice developed the design around what the studio calls a "repeatable basic unit" — a module that eventually became both the bench and the surrounding columns.

What shaped the cruciform design?

The crosses were not the starting point. Art Omi curator Julia van den Hout said rammed earth proved to be a "challenging material", and the structural realities of working with it drove the final form.

"They were not always crosses in our initial conversations," van den Hout told Dezeen. "As we started getting into the reality of trying to figure out how to construct this – because rammed earth is a challenging material to work with – and thinking structurally about how this would be built up, during those conversations, [it] shifted to being a cruciform column."

She added that the shape also appealed because "it has such a strong classic modernist shape".

How was it built?

Teams from Art Omi and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio constructed the columns on site, guided by a rammed-earth consultant based in Mexico. Van den Hout said the soil came from a construction site just down the road from Art Omi. Workers mixed it with sand and lime, then packed the mixture layer by layer into wooden formwork to build the sculptures.

The sourcing matters to the work's logic. The material is local, minimally processed, and destined to return to the ground — the title Borrowed Earth signals that the soil is on loan, not owned.

How long will it last?

Here the claims meet their test. Van den Hout says the installation should decay over about two years, but she concedes the team has no "strict answer" on its lifespan given weather and other external elements.

"It'll be an experiment," she said. "We don't quite know how fast it's going to go. It is definitely soft. It crumbles. It's lovely and tactile in that when you touch it, you really feel that sense that erosion can happen pretty easily. But simultaneously, they feel very stable."

What does this change for visitors? A sculpture that visibly ages — one where touching the surface is part of reading the work, and where the end state is erasure rather than preservation.

Borrowed Earth joins a run of commissions at Art Omi: MOS Architects created an aluminium sculpture there recently, and Young Projects installed a frayed wooden pavilion at the park in 2024. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, which is primarily based in Mexico, completed a sprawling aquarium in that country in 2023. How the Hudson Valley weather treats the crosses over the next two seasons will decide whether the experiment reads as elegy or simply as maintenance problem.