Spin Events
Richard Long: Walking and Marking
River Avon Mud Hand Circles, 2000 by Richard Long (c) Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison, London
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
26 July 2007, 6-7.30pm
This time last year, a gathering of artists, curators, friends and family assembled in Greyfriars Kirk to honour one of Scotland’s most important conceptual artists, Ian Hamilton Findlay. His son, Alec Finlay, related his father’s principals to Heraclitus’ philosophy that you can never step into the same river twice. It could be suggested that this is the impetus of all great Land Artists, including Richard Long, who also refers to this belief throughout his work.
As a graduate from the influential St Martin’s College of Art in London during the late sixties, Richard Long stood alongside Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George and Roger Ackling, as an artist who would completely alter our perception of art practice.
Whether Long is on a six-day walk through Torridon, kayaking down the Colombia River or working in Warli Tribal Land in Maharahtra, India, he works with the most immediate materials that are available to him to make his art. Using mud, water, sticks and stones, he forms them into elemental shapes such as lines, circles and spirals, to express, in a visually arresting way, his presence within the landscape.
Since Long makes art directly in the landscape, much of his work takes the form of photographs, maps and text pieces, however for the exhibition at the SNGMA, he has created Cornish Slate Cross 2007 in the grounds of the Gallery of Modern Art and mud drawings made from mud from the Firth of Forth.
This is a great opportunity to view 40 years of work in Long’s first retrospective in Britain since 1991.