During the 1960s and early 1970s, the art world was strongly impacted by the concepts of postmodernism, in which the meanings of all things were called into question. The concepts of postmodernism were founded on the ideas of deconstruction, through which it was discovered that even our most fundamental signs and symbols are capable of representing and communicating different meanings to different people depending on cultural and other understandings and experience. However, at the same time it was discovered that human beings are moved by many of the same emotions and basic motivations – the desire for love and understanding, the need for companionship, sadness, hate and despair are several examples. Out of these ideas grew the concept of earthwork art, heavily influenced by the ancient past, strongly associated with the divorce between the academic art of the gallery and the natural art of the time and often deeply involved in understanding and exposing the intimate relationship between humankind and the environment. Although “principles espoused by the earliest practitioners of Earthworks art had less to do with the impact of humanity on the environment than with a rebellion against the gallery system” (Siegal, 2004), a close investigation of Michael Heizer’s “Water Strider” reveals that the environment and its connection with the past and importance to the future played a significant role in the artist’s development of this project. The purpose of the present discussion is to discover how this particular artwork functions in relation to these concepts of the formless as they emerged out of postmodernism. “Water Strider” comprises one fifth of a larger work entitled Effigy Tumuli constructed on a bluff overlooking the Illinois River in a region known as Buffalo Rock State Park near Ottawa, Illinois. Completed in 1985, the work includes five different mounds constructed to represent five different forms of life that are indigenous to the region’s current environment. These are abstracted representations of creatures such as the insect known as a water strider, a catfish, a frog, a turtle and a snake. Each one is constructed to be an abstract representation in the style of the ancient Indians who once inhabited the region. Some, such as the figure of the turtle, is constructed using pre-existing geographical formations as a part of the construction. In this case, the turtle’s shell incorporates a hill that was already established on site. “Buffalo Rock was once the site of a mine, and as part of its conversion into a state park, the Ottawa Silica Company Foundation commissioned Heizer in 1983 to complete the large-scale tumuli at Buffalo Rock” (Tarasin, 2007). Its name is a literal description of what it is. Effigy is defined by the Random House Dictionary (2009) as “a representation or image, esp. sculptured, as on a monument” while the American Heritage Dictionary (2003) defines tumulus (the singular form of tumuli) as “an ancient grave mound.” Each structure is massive in keeping with the artist’s other works that have involved entire terrains. “Frog” is 340 feet long, “Turtle” is 650 feet long, “Catfish” is 770 feet long and “Snake” is 2,070 feet long (Tarasin, 2007). “Water Strider” is its