Richard Long, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Richard Long: Walking and Marking
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
30 June – 21 October 2007

A major exhibition of work by one of the great figures of contemporary British art is the highlight of the 2007 summer programme at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Richard Long’s innovative, beautiful, thought-provoking and influential work, which expresses man’s relationship with the landscape, has gained him a world-wide reputation. Spanning his entire career, and selected by the artist, Walking and Marking demonstrates how Richard Long has extended his artistic practice over forty years, bringing together examples of all of his signature methods and procedures. This will be the artist’s first major retrospective exhibition in the UK since 1991.

Based on the walks that he has made since the mid-1960s, Richard Long’s work takes the form of photographs, maps, drawings and sculptures - generally lines or circles - constructed from the places that Long passes along the way. Mud, a material that has a powerful resonance in his work, and which he has used in a number of ways for much of his career, is a major theme of the exhibition. The artist will remake three of his large-scale mud wall drawings in situ, and the display also features his mud-dipped works on paper and mud-splash drawings. For the exhibition, Long has also make a large cross-shaped sculpture in Cornish slate, to be sited in the gardens at the rear of the Gallery.

Born in Bristol in 1945, Richard Long studied at St Martin’s College of Art, in London, from 1966-68. While still a student he began making simple but precise walks that were formal or ritualised (rather than simply being a means of getting from one place to another), photographing the traces that he left behind (such as flattened grass, or stones laid at regular intervals). Interested in using nature and the landscape as his subject matter, but in a manner that departed from traditional representation, he made walking into a form of art. Since the 1960s walking has remained the basis of Long’s work, and he has made walks across the world, often in remote or inaccessible places such as the Himalayas, the Sahara or Patagonia. He has also made frequent walks in Scotland.

On walks made during the 1970s Long began laying rocks or sticks in straight lines or circles. For the artist, these simple, but potent forms have a universal significance and symbolism that is easily and commonly understood. The circle is a primitive, elemental sign, used by man as a means of communing with the earth, the moon or the gods. Paths are traces of mankind’s presence in the environment, and across the world are marked in different ways, with cairns, signposts, miletones, shrines and other sacred or cultural markers. During the 1970s, Richard Long was also making sculpture of natural materials in interior spaces, so the landscape remained the basis of his work. This exhibition includes the seminal Stone Line, 1980, his first work in slate, which is in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Richard Long’s circles and lines are made with common, natural materials, easily found to hand, and their placement is spontaneous, made in response to the places in which the artist finds himself. Often they may be seen by no-one but the artist, and are left to be re-absorbed by the environment, their impermanence a simple metaphor for the transience and mutability of nature. Richard Long has continued to use photography to make his activities accessible, but in different ways he also employs maps and texts to convey the idea of his walks. All of these is represented in the exhibition.

Much of Richard Long’s work is concerned making marks, impressions and traces. He equates the stones and other materials he uses with fingerprints, as each is uniquely individual and different. Richard Long has also made work using his own finger- and hand prints, including a number of works made on tree sections, driftwood, and other materials that he has collected. A number of these works are displayed in Edinburgh for the first time.

Richard Long was born near the River Avon, which flows into one of the biggest tidal estuaries in the world. The river and its mud have had a profound effect on his work. Mud is a simple, direct, natural material, like water, stones or dust. It is the product of the continual flow of water over millennia, caused by the pull of the lunar tides; it speaks of the natural world and the passing of time. Using diluted mud as if it was paint, Richard Long carefully splashes it on the walls with his hands, in a way that suggests the activity of man and also the activity of nature. He also dips paper in mud, creating extraordinary natural effects. Richard Long shows that this most mundane of materials can create poetic images. For the Edinburgh show, Richard Long uses mud from the Firth of Forth.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, which reproduces many of the installation works made by Richard Long in the past five years. It will include an interview between Richard Long and the exhibition’s curator, Patrick Elliott, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

A new collection of Richard Long’s statements and interviews, dating from 1971 to 2006 is published to coincide with this exhibition: Richard Long: Selected Statements and Interviews, published by Haunch of Venison, London. Edited by Ben Tufnell, the volume gathers together a number of key texts, many of which have not been widely available for some time.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART 
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org