In 2013, April Surgent had an artistic residency in an unlikely place: Antarctica. Struck by the sweep of sky, sea, and land, she took many photographs. Those images became the basis of a new body of cameo-engraved glass work; More Than a Picture of Ice, among others, celebrates an area where “the expanse of the horizon feels wholly endless,” she says.

If you reduce a landscape to its essence, you’re left with earth and sky, demarcated by horizon. Scottish weaver Sara Brennan’s tapestries, complicated only by their smudgy horizon lines, explore the subtle beauty of this ubiquitous and timeless composition.

From her perch on the Welsh coastline, Jan Lewin-Cadogan looks out into the sea, “watching crashing waves against volcanic rocks that push their way up through the sea, crunching the sea foam left behind on sand,” she says. That’s the impetus for her lava-glazed stoneware vessels. 

Architect Francesca Bonesio and photographer Nicolas Guiraud, who comprise Atelier 37.2 in Paris, are captivated by the horizon – so much so that they found a way to make it disappear. They manipulated perspective in their “inhabited sculpture” New Horizon, installed on the Danish coast in 2015. Through one window, visitors could view the sea, through the other, the sky – but could see no point at which the two met.

Maya Lin, the prodigy behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, has long been drawn to edges and borders. Her Storm King Wavefield, at the upstate New York art center, encompasses seven grassy waves nearly 400 feet long and up to 15 feet high. The sculpture suggests the ocean, of course, but also a horizon that seems to undulate forever.