Fritz Horstman
Cotton Scrim Valley
2026

The formal element of a U-shaped valley is drawn from the glacially formed landscape of much of northern Europe and North America, including the Thames River Valley in southeastern Connecticut and the entire Long Island Sound basin. When formed by a glacier, a valley will typically have a U-shaped profile, while a river-formed valley will typically be V-shaped. Cotton Scrim Valley describes a landscape formed by long-de-parted glaciers, using materials familiar to the human workers of the textile mills that once filled the river valleys of the northeast. Human history and geologic history are conflated. Each has played an indelible role in forming the landscape in which we now live.

Cotton Scrim Valley is the most recent in a series of U-Shaped Valley sculptures and drawings that I began making in 2016 after studying glacial forms in Svalbard, Norway. I began by attempting to create the forms of glaciers themselves. To hold those forms I created cradles, which were inherently the shape of the land beneath the glaciers – the valleys that were formed by the glaciers. At a certain point I realized that the glacier sculptures were less interesting than the valleys. Discarding the initial sculptures, I was left with U-shaped voids. They are literal and figurative containers for ideas about materials and process. Naturally, a glacier-less glacial valley offers an opportunity for a discussion of ecological concerns. Previous U-Shaped Valley sculptures have been made in a wide range of materials, as small as a few inches and as large as 15 feet long. The sheets in Cotton Scrim Valley form a 68-inch cube. I am 68 inches tall, thus referencing my own body in the dimensions of the sculpture and further underlining the impact of humans on the landscape.