Event date: 25 February 2025
Review by Danusia Wurm
Circle in Africa. Mulanje Mountain, Malawi, 1978
Imagine a slowing down of time. Imagine “seeing” stillness. Imagine the celebration of a journey’s end.
This was the experience of the sell-out audience at Sir Richard Long’s fascinating and magnificently illustrated talk, which took place at the Norwich University of the Art’s state-of-the art auditorium.
Richard Long has been at the forefront of land art for more than half a century. A pioneer of conceptual practices in the 1960s, his expanded approach to sculpture has consistently taken the medium out of the studio into the natural world and around the globe, using time, space, distance, navigation, perception, the elements and the geological forces that have shaped the landscape around us as both his tools and his vocabulary. Long has sited sculpture on all five continents, as well as in many of the world’s most significant galleries and museums.
“My work has become a simple metaphor of life.”
Long’s practice involves walking great distances in the wilderness, then pausing to make works referencing natural and cosmic phenomena experienced along the way. He uses walking, therefore, as both medium and measure, and his works act as a direct response to the world in which he lives. This way of working offers the potential to make sculpture anywhere and at any time, free from the constraints that can otherwise arise with producing art.
Using earth, rocks, sticks and other natural materials and forces ranging from water and gravity to clouds and constellations of stars, Long leaves a mark or arrangement within an ever-shifting elemental terrain that exerts its own laws of regulation over the end-result. This is his way of expressing ideas about time and space, and what it means to be human when removed from the cacophony of contemporary life.
People constantly ask Long ‘why always circles and lines and walking?’
“Every place in the world is different, so even though I might be repeating circles, every circle is different. The archetype of the circle emphasizes the cosmic variety of everything, and this gives it its power, beauty, understandability, and resonance”.
“I’m not a political animal. I’m an artist animal. ”
Given his affinity to the natural environment, people also question whether Long is an environmentalist.
Long says “Green politics wasn’t really invented when I started. My work comes out of wanting to make art in new ways. The world outside the studio represented a fantastically colossal opportunity to engage with the physical world. It was my interest in making new art that took me into the landscape. I’m not a political animal. I’m an artist animal. But obviously my work does celebrate nature and the wonderful landscapes that cover most of the planet.”
“I wouldn’t be the artist I am without a camera”
The simple majesty of Long’s physical sculptural works is matched by his remarkable photography, which records it for posterity. He says “I wouldn’t be the artist I am without a camera. It’s a bridge to how my works find their way into the world. You know what I do because I have shown you what I have done”.
Long’s accompanying words describing his philosophy and art work, realised in numerous books, are equally as powerful. Perhaps put at its most eloquent, he says “I go into the world with an open mind”.
ncas would like to thank Richard Long for his totally absorbing narrative and Norwich University of the Arts for hosting and their excellent help on the day.
I would also like to namecheck Nicolas Wroe, Patrick Barkham and Ina Cole whose excellent articles I have sampled.