Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)
Great Salt Lake, Utah

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson carved a colossal spiral into the northeastern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Made from over 6,000 tons of basalt rock, mud, and salt, Spiral Jetty unfurls 1,500 feet into the lake in a counterclockwise coil—a shape drawn from the molecular structure of salt crystals and the slow, geological poetry of the surrounding terrain.

As one of the most iconic works of Land Art, Spiral Jetty challenged the idea that art belonged inside white walls. Instead, it was built from the land itself, and into it—a sculpture that shifts with the tides, reflects the sky, and dissolves slowly over time. Smithson was fascinated by entropy, prehistory, and transformation. The site was chosen for its strangeness: red microbial waters, salt-encrusted shores, volcanic rock. “I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,” he once said.

The spiral, ancient and elemental, was central to this vision. At once natural and mathematical, it holds tension between chaos and order, expansion and return. Smithson’s coil evokes not just movement but a continuous meditation on time—cyclical, cosmic, incomplete.

At Marquisate, the spiral holds similar weight. It appears again and again in our work: not simply decorative, but symbolic of continuity, transformation, and energy in motion. In Spiral Jetty, we see the same fascination—a geometry that speaks across cultures, disciplines, and millennia.

To walk the Jetty is to enter a living sculpture. You move through space, through time, through the artist’s own questions about decay, permanence, and perception. The path spirals inward, yet the experience expands outward.

A line of stone drawn across a lake becomes a meditation on everything we can’t hold still—land, light, memory, meaning.