Horse play: elegant equines in the American landscape in pictures | Art and design

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Horse play: elegant equines in the American landscape – in pictures

Every summer for a decade, Mimi Plumb travelled to California’s Kings Canyon to befriend a band of horses and take these magical portraits

@mlestone Main image: The mane event … a horse tests the water. Photograph: Mimi Plumb

Wed 19 Jul 2023 02.00 EDT

  • Leepa sleeps

    Mimi Plumb’s Megalith-Still is a meditation on the sublime of the untamed American landscape – featuring numerous equine models. Here we see one fast asleep. Young horses often sleep up to 12 hours a day. Megalith-Still is available to buy via Stanley/Barker. All photographs: Mimi Plumb/Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery and Stanley/Barker

  • In the woods

    Heading to the river in the late afternoon. Over the course of multiple summers between 1995 and 2005, Plumb travelled from her home in San Francisco to Kings Canyon, a wilderness where she communed with a band of semi-wild horses

  • Legs and belly

    Plumb would come to produce a series of portraits of the herd, imbued with a deep tenderness and powerful psychic weight

  • Testing the water

    Ger gets ready to roll in the wet meadow

  • Rain in hoofprints

    Most days bring a rain storm, at times with lightning and thunder. The horses hide under the pine trees west of the meadow to avoid being struck

  • Leepa crossing the river

    Mimi Plumb: ‘I am in a meadow high in the Sierra Nevada. Channels of the San Joaquin River braid through the thick, lush grass. I take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pants and wade through the shallow water to where the horses are now eating. They trace a pattern, mysterious to me, around and around the meadow, eating, drinking and sleeping’

  • Gypsy in the trees

    ‘A poem, The Horses by Edwin Muir, speaks to why I began this series: “Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world / Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden”’

  • Leepa’s tail

    The horses sleep lying down, legs twitching, mouths wrapped around blades of grass. The flies are attracted to their moist, flickering eyes

  • A blade of grass

    ‘I’m as close as I can focus, examining their faces, tails, hooves and bellies, bewitched by the sensuality of horse and place’

  • The band

    Late in afternoon, the herd of 20 to 30 horses abruptly leave the meadow in a single line, heading to an island across the river

  • The path to the river

    ‘I race after them through a swamp of thick mud and dead trees and branches which scratch my arms. They trot and canter, moving faster than they’ve moved all day. I can’t catch up to them’

  • Drinking water along San Joaquin River

    ‘When I reach the edge of the main riverbank, I see the last of the horses cautiously step into the deep, swift moving water, and slowly float to the other side’

  • Deep in the woods

    In the woods along the south side of the meadow
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