There are all different kinds of ways we still do it. Everything I do is a marker in a sense. His beautifully crafted sculptures are not easy to characterize. They have a contemporary, pared-down look, but they incongruously combine historic materials from different technological eras. Rocks of the Stone Age mesh harmoniously with Iron Age metal.
Timeless wood is polished or painted.
The works' colorations are subtle, but gorgeous. It memorializes the rest stops in Mexican funeral processions, Borcherdt says, and by extension calls to mind the wooden crosses planted along roadways to pinpoint an accident victim's place of death. It's tempting to connect the artist's Markers to the human scarrings of the desert during the recent decades of explosive growth, but he discounts the notion. His art does grapple with the tension between connecting with nature and conquering it, but the matchbox houses that have taken root below the mountain are functional structures, Borcherdt says, not the metaphorical markings he has in mind. He aims for work that creates a sense of place.