Ground Operation is a conceptually simple earthwork: an incision made in a grassy landscape is pealed back then stitched back together, much like an open wound after an injury or surgery.

French artist Estelle Chrétien sliced open the ground then wrapped electrical cables through it like shoelaces, either in the process of being tied or becoming undone (a mystery left for the observer to unravel, as it were). Her use of cabling is also very intentional, meant to raise questions about what we put into the Earth and how we use it — a surfacing of the secret infrastructure that lurks below.

Similar techniques, themes and materials can be found in other works by the same artist, who has wrapped hay bales in crocheted covers and put boots on trees.

“While in Portugal, I learned how to crochet, and I had this piece of blue agricultural baler twine in a box and the idea of [making a hay bale wrap] came to me,” she says. “When I went back to France, I made it and put it in a field just before farmers stored their bales. I liked working in the middle of a barley field, but most of the work was made at home, so I decided to work outside with my hands more often after that.”

Able to print full-sized structures from mud and clay, this 40-foot-tall 3D printer represents a huge step toward printing affordable housing from free materials. The project was unveiled yesterday, debuting with a live demonstration at a three day rally event in Italy along with a series of workshops and conferences.

Representing a hybrid of biomimicry, new technologies and ancient building techniques, the BigDelta printer from World’s Advanced Saving Project (WASP) draws inspiration from natural and human precedents.

BigDelta’s structural strategies and resulting home shapes are informed by a breed of wasp that constructs mud homes as well as a long human tradition of creating earthen dwellings.

Building with water, dirt, clay and plant fibers taps into a set of plentiful organic resources, reduces environmental impacts, obviates the cost of and need to ship materials and provides naturally robust and insulated housing shells.

The lightweight steel frame of the printer itself, supporting a giant printing nozzle suspended in its open center, is easy to collapse and transport between construction sites.

This larger model follows a smaller Delta prototype used to execute a series of complex geometric structures at reduced size, testing the technology and materials.

The design aims to address a growing housing crisis: “by 2030, international estimates foresee a rapid growth of adequate housing requirements for over 4 billion people living with yearly income below $3,000. The United Nations calculated that over the next 15 years there will be an average daily requirement of 100.000 new housing units to meet this demand.”

Typical art travels inside, safely stowed in carefully-packed containers to prevent damage – these drawings do the opposite, playing up the folk-artsy practice of scribbling into built-up grime on vehicles.

“Using his finger to scribe into the layer of dirt built-up from exhaust emissions,” Ben Long “creates elaborate drawings on the rear shutters of white haulage trucks. In this on-going series, collectively entitled The Great Travelling Art Exhibition, he expands upon the daubing and crude slogans that commonly adorn commercial freight vehicles.”

Some of the pieces will be rapidly wiped away by rain or vandals, but others have survived for as long as six months and on long cross-country road-trips made by their drivers. Like street art, these reverse graffiti works are susceptible to the elements and necessarily temporary.

The artist’s motivations are various, but include a desire to make his work more accessible outside of traditional gallery spaces, reduce the costs of creative expression by using free materials and obviating the need for a studio space in which to create.

At the same time, there are a lot of artistic conventions still in play here – hallmarks of the ‘high art’ world, as it were. Long crafts these compositions within (and with reference to) a fixed frame, much like a canvass, and signs the pieces as well.

Art rarely gets as gritty and real as this, particularly in a gallery, with rocks, earth and water running through simple doors, between white-walled rooms and under uniform interior lighting.

Olafur Eliasson, a Danish and Icelandic artist, created Riverbed as one of a series of installations for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, challenging visitors to experience both museums and landscapes in new ways.

Meanwhile, the spaces become both intimate and perhaps uncomfortable as the earthwork slopes upward into ultimately-inaccessible areas.

The artist explains: “What I’m interested in with my work at the Louisiana isn’t really that you experience an object or an artwork. I am interested in how you connect this landscape to the rest of the world and ultimately, how you experience yourself within it.”

Traditional floor tiles slowly give way to a rugged landscape of stones and dirt, leading up to the sides of a real river inexplicably traversing the gallery interior.

Aside from other references, the work is a nod to the sculpture garden that used to sit in the same spaces where this section of interior galleries now stands.

“When we’re in our familiar surroundings, in our circle of family and friends, our senses are very finely tuned, but the further away we get from the local context, the cruder the sensing becomes. I wonder if our focus on the atmospheric can give us a relationship with something that is very abstract and far away.” (Images by Anders Sune Berg)