Sir Richard Julian Long, (born 2 June 1945) is an English sculptor and one of the best-known British land artists.
Long is the only artist to have been short-listed four times for the Turner Prize. He was nominated in 1984, 1987 and 1988, and then won the award in 1989 for White Water Line. He lives and works in Bristol, the city in which he was born.
Long studied at Saint Martin's School of Art before going on to create work using various media including sculpture, photography and text. His work is on permanent display in Britain at the Tate and Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery as well as galleries in America, Switzerland and Australia.
Long's work has broadened the idea of sculpture to be a part of performance art and conceptual art. His work typically is made of earth, rock, mud, stone and other nature based materials. In exhibitions his work is typically displayed with the materials or through documentary photographs of his performances and experiences.
For Richard Long the walks he makes are works of art. He describes his walking pieces as ‘the distillation of experience’ which serve to ‘feed the imagination’.
In this work, Long uses two lists of words to record his experience of two hikes across Dartmoor. The first walk is evoked through a string of natural landmarks with ancient and evocative names. The second route is described in a series of physical experiences, such as creaking ice or using stepping-stones to cross a river.
Gallery label, March 2004
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-two-straight-twelve-mile-walks-on-dartmoor-england-1980-t03161
In the winter of 1964, Richard Long was a student at the West of England College of Art in his home town of Bristol. With snow lying on the ground, Long went up to the Downs, where he rolled a snowball down a slope, nudging it to follow the gentle contours of the terrain. Although he then photographed the irregular line he had created, this was not with a view to exhibiting the picture. The work of art was the track itself, and the fact that it would inevitably soon disappear was an integral part of its composition.
Shortly after Long completed this exercise, the college authorities requested a meeting with his parents. Life drawing was still the staple of art students' training then, while more avant-garde work took its cue from pop rather than conceptual artists.
"I'd been doing a lot of experimental and environmental work," Long explains, "digging up turf in a disused garden and pouring plaster into the holes. So it was a natural progression to make the snowball track. After that I realised that even just walking leaves a track. But they thought I was too precocious. They told my parents they were chucking me out because I was mad."
Even today, his work can provoke howls of outrage. But as the critic Rudi Fuchs noted in a catalogue essay accompanying Long's 1986 show at the New York Guggenheim museum, what was remarkable was "how close Richard Long, barely 20 years old, already was to what was to become his 'language'".
The underlying principles that underpinned Snowball Track would feature again and again throughout his career: the intimate linking of the work to the earth, the physical intervention of the artist, the impact of time. They are preoccupations that have contributed to a body of work that is today represented in every major museum of modern art in the world. An exhibition of his latest work opened in London earlier this month.
His early reputation depended on sculptures made in the landscape in and around Bristol. "But even though I knew I was doing these really interesting and original works, in my naivety I only took one rudimentary photograph with one negative. It wasn't until a few years later, when art was being reinvented, that I realised that the photo itself could be a work of art and presented as such.
I thought of those early works as public freehold, not owned by anyone, but just out there. Then I began to see there were different ways to present my art; through a photograph, a walk, a sculpture or a text. "Long's next key work was his 1967 A Line Made by Walking, in which he repeatedly walked back and forth over the grass in a London park until he created a distinct line.
The idea that a walk itself could be a work of art soon followed and Long began his continuing programme of increasingly epic walks in wildernesses all over the world. He would drag the heel of his boot in the earth or kick some wood or stones together, creating simple lines or circles in the natural environment which would then be photographed and exhibited. He then began to mark his routes -spirals, circles, straight lines - on maps that could be shown in a gallery.
He would record events encountered on the way as text: arrows marking changes in wind direction, the names of rivers crossed or sightings of clouds. He constructed wood and rock sculptures on the floors of galleries as well as leaving patterns of muddy footprints and handprints on the walls. Almost four decades on, Long's art remains challenging. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew has written about the process of coming to terms with Long's work, saying that it "obliged me to enlarge my own definitions of what art might be".
Sat 28 Jun 2003 02.00 BST
While doing my recent research I found it incredibly useful watching videos of artists talking about their work. You gather a true spin on what kind of character the artist is and what the work truly means to them. I believe that is evident in the video above which is a conversation between Richard Long and Stephen Snoddy. There are many ways in which I carry out my research. I often start out with the artist/ photographers website and have a read of their bio and look through their work. Then, usually I will look through the internet for reviews and other articles regarding their work to see what the response of the art world is to the work that they produce. As well as this, I am now going onto Youtube and specifically finding video interviews where I am able to listen to the artist’s talk about the work that they are producing. I feel like by doing this process, I am able to build a rounded view of the artist and their work which I can then make my own opinions on, write critically and allow inspiration to flow into the body of work that I am endeavoring to create.
In the video above, Long talks about the solitude that he gathers when going on his long walks. He is asked whether he listens to music on his walks, he replies saying he does not, nor does he take books. This is because he likes to be in the present and that is what inspires him to make the work. “Walking is in the here and now” which is something that I can relate to when I am making my work. When you are in the landscape, it is you and the land, with no distractions or superficiality, you feel alive every moment and at peace when you look back on where you have travelled from.
The process of walking and travelling connects you to the land in a spiritual way. Long talks about the sculptures that he makes in the land, placing rocks in a formation or straight lines in the landscape which are then photographed by him. To the art audience, what he is making is art, but for people that walk past his work in the land, it can easily be disregarded. This process is part of Long’s artistic identity, he is working with the land to create work, using the raw materials that he finds near him to manipulate the organic shapes of the land.
The low impact and poetic character of Long’s work connect the audience to the space that he is making his work in. It is clear that within the work, Long is connected to the land that he is creating work on. Spending lengthy periods of time walking and wandering through the land gives an open perspective to the beauty of the natural world. This is transpired and shared with the world through the photographs taken of the sculptures made.
The walking process that Long takes to create his work is something that I am inspired by. I find myself also making work when I am on a walk or a journey. I very rarely find myself going to a location to take photographs. For me, a big part of the creative process is taking the time to walk through the land and to be truly immersed in the environment. This allows an increasing spiritual connection with the spaces that you encounter as memories are collected from the extended periods of time spent in the space. Going forward with my body of work, I too, would like to use walking practice to create the work for this project. I want to do this because I believe it will allow a deeper thought process to happen when I am immersed in the land for longer periods of time.