Some artists create their work with paint brushes or pottery wheels. Ruth Burke, an assistant professor in the Wonsook Kim School of Art, prefers using 2,000-pound oxen.
As the recipient of a nearly $50,000, two-year grant from North Central Region SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education), Burke is building four pollinator-friendly earthworks in McLean County with heavy lifting—or, in this case, pulling—contributed by her team of 5-year-old oxen named Clark and Sparky.
Appears In“I started dreaming of this project in 2018, and I knew that it was going to be a huge undertaking,” said Burke. In addition to the SARE grant, Burke’s research is supported by the Harold Boyd Professorship in Art Endowment funded by alum Wonsook Kim ’75, M.A. ’76, M.F.A. ’78, honorary doctorate of arts ’19, and husband Thomas Clement. Burke said she is grateful for the “incredible” gift that will help make her vision a reality.
According to Burke, an earthwork is a sculpture that can be large or small, often outdoors, and is fabricated from natural materials. She has already created two earthworks in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Ruth Burke
“I have to treat them like athletes. They have to build stamina. With any team of oxen and their driver, there also has to be mutual respect, and I think respect and trust is what grounds our relationship.”
While working toward her M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, Burke was inspired by Professor Holly Hughes, an internationally acclaimed performance artist, to merge her passion for animals and art. Burke brought her earthwork idea, using draft animals, with her when she joined Illinois State University’s faculty in 2020.
“As I researched the school and the history of Central Illinois, I was like, wow, there’s some serious synchronicity lining up,” Burke said.
She spent four weeks enrolled in draft animal classes at Tillers International in Scotts, Michigan, and although Burke originally planned to use horses—her favorite animal, which she grew up riding as a child—to help create her next earthwork, she decided on oxen instead.
The original tractors, oxen are strong and resilient animals that were widely used by Central Illinois farmers for more than a century.
“They are magnificent creatures, and they are so perceptive,” Burke said. Six months after completing the oxen driving class, Burke purchased Clark and Sparky (yes, their names are a National Lampoon’s Vacation reference).
The 8 ½-month old oxen, born on a commercial dairy farm in Maine, were the size of Great Dane dogs when they arrived on Burke’s farm east of Bloomington. Now, they’re well over 5 feet tall.
“That was one of the best days of my entire life when these guys got off the trailer,” Burke said.
Ruth Burke stands in front of Bailing Drawing No. 2, a sculpture made with recycled polypropylene baling twine, sisal baling twine, baling netting, and chicken wire, located in her studio on her farm east of Bloomington.
To prepare Clark and Sparky for their working lives, Burke trained the young oxen to pull small loads, such as tires, around the farm and socialized them with other people and animals. Burke and her husband also have a horse, 17 egg-laying hens, a dog, and three “aggressively friendly” barn cats.
As Clark and Sparky grew, so did the amount of weight they could pull. Burke uses the oxen to till her large garden and haul endless loads of manure to the compost pile. And she continues training them, as one of just seven oxen teams in Illinois, for their upcoming earthwork jobs by attaching a 400-pound tractor tire for them to pull on hourlong walks. The pair can now pull 4,000 pounds for a half mile on flat ground.
“I have to treat them like athletes. They have to build stamina,” Burke said. “With any team of oxen and their driver, there also has to be mutual respect, and I think respect and trust is what grounds our relationship.”
The history of the earthwork artform that Clark and Sparky will help construct can be traced back to ancient Indigenous people. For example, 100-foot-tall Monks Mound, built between 900 and 1,200 AD and located within Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis, is the largest prehistoric earthwork in the Western Hemisphere.
The four locations for Burke’s SARE’s-funded earthworks include larger-scale projects at the Illinois State University Horticulture Center in Normal and another near Gibson City, along with smaller, linear pollinator strips in Downs and Heyworth.
Burke identified the locations by connecting with local farmers interested in supporting the mission of her research, which is to raise awareness of the importance of biodiversity and healthy food systems in Central Illinois, create pollinator food-habitats, enhance soil health, and foster resilient community infrastructures.
“I’m the one who wrote the grant, but as far as the work and knowing the land—this is a highly collaborative project,” Burke said. “The partners that I’m working with are very active participants who are letting me use their land, and they have agency to make decisions based on what’s worked and what hasn’t in their experiences.”
Ruth Burke drives her oxen, Clark and Sparky, during Sunset on the Longest Day at the Illinois State University Horticulture Center in June 2023.
Among Burke’s collaborators is Jessica Chambers ’93, director of the Horticulture Center, who is eager for the earthwork to take shape in a currently vacant, grassy one-acre plot on the center’s far west side.
“Of the center’s three-pronged mission, one of the prongs is research,” Chambers said. “To have professors, such as Ruth, interested in working with the center is exciting.”
For the Horticulture Center earthwork, Burke will build a mound of logs and sticks covered in topsoil and purple prairie cover with “arms” of nearly 30 types of pollinator-friendly flowers and plants extending outward to resemble a sun the size of more than half a football field (60 yards by 52 yards).
Burke is also collaborating with Dr. Shannon Epplett, an instructional assistant professor of English and a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, to make the earthwork a “living land acknowledgment.”
“This is an opportunity to really put the land acknowledgment that ISU uses into action,” Burke said. “I hope that people recognize that we are uninvited guests on Native land and that each of us is connected to every single living thing and, as we face the climate crisis, we have a responsibility to our future.”
In June 2023, Epplett staged an opening performance piece for the Horticulture Center earthwork titled Sunset on the Longest Day. A crowd of more than 100 people gathered at the earthwork site as eight Native performers held large sheets of paper with single words that, put together, revealed phrases such as “We are still here.” A drummer cued sign changes, and a flute accompanied spoken sections. Burke and her oxen were part of the performance too.
“Native people are almost entirely absent in Central Illinois, due to Indian removal and assimilation policies,” Epplett said. “We are invisible, and you don’t think about what you don’t see. This earthwork is intended as a reminder and an acknowledgment of the people from whom the land was stolen, of the lives and cultures displaced by colonization. It isn’t an apology, but it is a first step toward a reparation. By putting back the prairie, the plants, and the pollinators—I see it is an act of healing and a move toward reconciliation with Native people and Native lands.”
Inspired by Epplett’s Sunset on the Longest Day performance, Burke hopes to incorporate text-based signage generated by Native people into the earthwork to “put their voices in the present.” She also hopes to commission an Indigenous artist to create a sculpture for the center of the Horticulture Center earthwork.
“We really believe that it’s important that we educate and acknowledge the people and the plants and animals that were here before us,” Chambers said. “What Ruth is doing falls beautifully in line with what we’re doing at the center.”
Burke’s work will begin in late spring 2025 with a field day where Clark and Sparky, along with several other draft teams, will plow and till the field. She will also use her oxen to haul the logs and other materials to build the earthwork’s central mound.
A few weeks later, Burke will invite the community to plant dozens of strategically picked native plants and flowers that will make her Horticulture Center earthwork bloom. Her other three earthwork projects will follow a similar timeline.
“I’m really hoping those experiences inspire people,” Burke said. “I don’t care if you only have a small pot in your kitchen, or if you have a garden or a lawn. You can make some deliberate choices about your environment that will not only be beautiful to look at but will also benefit the soil and the pollinators.”
Burke, who considers the SARE-funded earthworks her “life’s work,” also wants the seeds from her project to blossom into a vision for a sustainable future where pollinators, the environment, and future generations can thrive.
“I hope the earthworks cause people to take action somewhere else in their life, whether that’s planting native plants or teaching their kids about Indigenous history, or just having a beautiful meditative moment,” Burke said. “I hope that the work meets them wherever they are.”
