The Prairie Ladder project began as a commision from the Connemara Conservancy, an organization with large land holdings in central Texas, with the stated purpose of preserving, protecting, and honoring the prairie landscape. Each year a few artists are selected and given funding to produce an installation on the land, which supports and brings attention to the foundation's mission. Working together with our friend and frequent collaborator, Cameron Schoepp, a sculptor from Fort Worth, Texas, we spent a great deal of time on the site, synthesizing our own experience of this place with the larger tradition of human settlement on the archetypal landscape of the western prairie.

As the project developed, we envisioned a series of big, ladder related objects spread out all over a large swath of Texas, each focusing on a singular, pure experience of the prairie as a trinity of horizon, earth, and sky. We became particularly interested in this fundamentally American landscape in which human beings have no particular place, where physical and conceptual space can only be understood as a line between the sky, which is no home for human beings, and the belowground, which is no home for human beings.

The selection of the ladder as an element common to each of the works introduces a veritcal axis, making a departure from the natural horizontal axis of the prairie. The ladder also provides a human scale, and proclaims human defiance of the horizontal limitations of the earth. This real or implied activity of vertical movement on the prairie, whether up into the sky or down into the earth, is the defining characteristic of placemaking-of human settlement or intervention in the existing primal environment.