In 1977 the landscape artist and sculptor Richard Long visited the MacGillycuddy’s Reeks in Co Kerry. He picked up a stone, threw it, walked to its landing place and from there threw it forward again. He continued throwing the stone and walking in this way, repeating the action an astonishing 3,628 times until he had completed a two-and-a-half day circular walk of the mountains.
Some may view this behaviour as verging on the eccentric but for those intrigued by Long’s work, the Tate Britain in London is running a huge summer exhibition featuring his photographs and sculptures giving a whole new meaning to the term “going for a walk”.
“Heaven and Earth” comprises 70 works providing an opportunity to understand his radical rethinking of the fusion between art and landscape.
Using walking as his medium he first came to prominence more than 40 years ago and revolutionised the definition of sculpture. Since then, his solitary walks have taken him, not only through rural Ireland and Britain, but as far afield as the Canadian prairies, the Bolivian wilderness, the Australian outback, the Norwegian wasteland and, in one case, a 100-mile walk across a bamboo forest in Japan.
In his work he explores what he calls “relationships between time, distance, geography, measurement and movement”. Distinctive themes cover stone sculptures, mud works as well as photographs, maps, and text works recording walks in global locations or local areas such as Dartmoor in which he has become absorbed.
Since a visit in the spring of 1966, Ireland has held a fascination for him and he has made many return journeys. He has traversed the country west-east and south-north as well as tramping extensively in 1980 in the mountains of Cork, Waterford, Tipperary and Limerick. In 1974 he embarked on a 164-mile walk through parts of Munster and Leinster placing a stone on the road at every mile along the way. He spent six days walking 100 miles along a line in Co Mayo and has produced stone sculptures on beaches and in fields in Connemara and the Burren. During the winter of 1998 he walked 221 miles from the west to the east coast of Ireland. One of the evocative black and white images on display, “A Circle in Ireland”, features the Burren and is taken near the coast at Doolin with the Cliffs of Moher as a backdrop. Shards of stones are arranged in a circle around a section of limestone pavement clints which the artist photographed.
He regards his photographs as a testament to his presence representing an image that stands for the whole experience of the walk.
Stones are an essential part of Long’s life and work. On his walks, he realigns scattered stones laying them in simple geometric configurations in lines, circles or ovoid patterns.
Often, he carries a stone with him on his arduous journeys and has been known to lug rocks uphill. Although he may adjust the natural order of wilderness places, perhaps up-ending stones, he never makes major alterations to the landscapes.
In 1989 (the year he won the Turner prize) he covered 203 miles over six days walking from Cork to Sligo. This is reproduced, not as a dramatic photographic image, but in the form of a large folding card with the title Kicking Stones. It contains a list of more than 80 placenames, signposts, graffiti, and comments or snippets of conversation from people whom he met on his meandering journey.
These gnomic haikus, or what some writers refer to as ‘nibble notes’, are set out in a lengthy list; a glance through them throws up a curious incantation of observations and eavesdropping noted in his Irish wanderings: “River Valley Lounge Ballads Snacks, Hallo A Bad Evening, Sheep Mart Every Sat 11 A.M. Sharp, Rainbow, Good Day T’You, Soft Margin, My Mother Never Let Anyone Pass Her Door Without Feeding Them, Smoke Walnut Plug, Land Poisoned, Kicking a Stone Along Six Times.” His “Walking Music” text work records tunes that came into his mind on a 168-mile trek from the Blackwater Valley through the Burren to Athenry: Sinéad O’Connor singing On Raglan Road, Róisín Dubh played on a tin whistle, and songs by Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.
Richard Long sees himself as a conceptual artist engaging with the landscape and nature. But critics are divided about his work. Some feel he revolutionised the definition of sculpture, freeing it from the constraints of scale leading to works that are timeless in their rhythm and beauty.
Others have been positively rude about his work refusing to understand or appreciate his artistic raison d’etre.
The exhibition, which runs until September 6th, includes six major stone sculptures in the large central gallery. It contains early examples of remote stone sculptures, such as the first stone circle made while walking in the Andes in 1972. You can view a key early work, “A Line Made by Walking (1967)”, where in a field in the south-west of England the artist, at the age of 22, walked back and forth until the flattened grass caught by the sunlight became visible as a line which he then photographed.
If you’re visiting London during the summer then take the tube to Pimlico.
As you wander round the rooms in Tate Britain, follow in some of Long’s footprints and make up your own mind about his work. It may inspire you to pull on your walking boots, pack your rucksack, camera and bandanna, gather a few stones, and commune with the landscape creating your own straight line.