Maya Lin: building nature: the artist unveils several permanent public projects this year, and a traveling exhibition of her recent studio work is now on view in San Diego

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Much of Maya Lin's time since her 1998-99 traveling exhibition, "Topologies," has been spent on large-scale public and private commissions of art and architecture. The list of projects that she has completed since then is staggering. (1) Meanwhile, she has created new studio artworks, which were assembled in "Systematic Landscapes," an exhibition curated by Richard Andrews, director of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, where it premiered. Now in the midst of a national tour, the show includes several room-size installations as well as smaller pieces. Many of the latter were not on view at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, where I saw the show.

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Lin has always been motivated by a deep connection to nature, but over the years, the natural world and its endangered state have become central to her practice. Her commitment often reveals itself in her choices of the commissions she accepts and the materials she uses. Certain forms appear again and again in Lin's oeuvre: mounds, craters, intricate crevices and meandering lines. Her training as an architect leads her to consider these structures in terms of the built environment. Acquiring factual information made available through contemporary technologies (from computer-aided design software to sonar bathymetric maps), she breaks down elements of nature and uses that data to rebuild them as sculptural forms. The multiple methods of mapping she employs, both two- and three-dimensional, remain evident in her final product. Topographic maps, handmade models and line drawings are key to her process.

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In "Systematic Landscapes," geological formations are brought into the museum context. Lin's motifs often display the knotty irregularities of erosion, creating a formal richness that pulls the viewer in close to examine minute nooks and turns. Such is the case in the "Bodies of Water" series (2006), three Baltic birch plywood constructions based on the shapes of the Red, the Black and the Caspian sea basins. The locations she has chosen have ecologies that are significantly imperiled by mankind's activities. (2) Stacked sheets of wood decrease downward in size incrementally, from the tops (which are between 5 and 7 feet at their maximum dimension) to bases less than a foot across. The tops are smooth and light in color with slightly glossy surfaces. The striated sides are stained a deep brown. Lin has increased the depth of the seas significantly in relation to the surface area to enhance the shape of the approximately 15-inch-high complex basins. She plays with the idea of "bodies" of water by turning liquid into solid volume and offers an interpretation of these inland seas that is unavailable to the human eye.

In the works called Pin Rivers, Lin again concentrates on bodies of water. She sticks straight pins directly into the wall to reproduce river routes. At the Henry, she presented the Columbia River; for St. Louis, she remade the piece, mapping the Mississippi and the Missouri, which meet just outside the city. The snaking lines of pins cast overlapping shadows on the wall, adding subtle tonalities and illusory width. Light reflecting off the pinheads created sparkling highlights.

Her attraction to cartography is expressed in some of the smallest works in the show, which use maps as the foundation for low-relief landscapes. In the "Atlas Landscape" series, she cuts into the pages of open atlases, which are displayed flat on pedestals. Each face of the open book becomes the ground for a form, such as a crater or a ridge, made by carving into the pages with an Exacto knife. Slicing away parts of the top layers of the maps often creates bizarre juxtapositions. For example on the right side of Atlas Landscape, Rand McNally Cosmopolitan World Atlas, 1987 (2006), Germany and Southeast Asia are neighbors, separated only by Lin's handmade canyon. These reconfigurations of the geopolitical landscape are like cartographic equivalents of concrete poetry.

Lin's work is often fed by opposites. For example, 2 x 4 Landscape (2006) began with an almost childlike urge: she wanted to make a hill indoors and run to the top. Producing an enormous mound that can be broken down into sections, packed up and moved from venue to venue requires a great deal of design and construction. Made entirely of upright two-by-fours, the installation covers approximately 52 by 36 feet of floor space and rises to a height of 10 feet. From a distance, the slightly crested hill is all gentle curves and swells. The sensuous form, once the work is approached, contrasts sharply with its texture. Each beam stands higher or lower than its neighbor by a few inches, creating an uneven, choppy surface. A computer program calculated the variable heights to allow for a regular transition from the fiats around the perimeter to the rising mound. The result, as Lin describes it, is a pixelated landscape in three dimensions.