Time and Space

The publication is not intended as a catalogue. Rather, it focuses specifically on Richard Long’s work from recent years, offering an opportunity to consider how his work is situated today, and marking an important moment to celebrate a career spanning six decades and lifetime’s engagement with landscape through journeys made around the world. Published on the occasion of a major solo exhibition of Richard Long’s work at Arnolfini (31 July – 15 November 2015), in the artist’s home city of Bristol, this new publication focuses on the artist’s work from recent years, including sculptures, exhibitions, textworks and drawings. Richard Long is considered to be among the most important artists of his generation. He has realised many works that engage with the landscape, investigating nature and his experience within it. Like other artists associated with the Conceptual and Minimal Art movements of the mid-sixties, he emphasises the process of perception and ideas in art, while his works create moments of beauty and poetry inside and outside of gallery spaces. Walking is central to Long’s work as a way of perceiving and recording landscape; early in his career he established the precedent that art could be a journey and that a sculpture could be deconstructed over the distance of a journey. His beguilingly simple works use raw materials such as stones and driftwood, found along the way. These works are often simple interventions, marks of passage. Often these works leave little or no trace and works are documented through photographs or text works that record his ideas, observations and experiences. Walking as a medium has enabled the artist to articulate ideas about time and space. He seeks a freedom of movement and expression, and a balance with the natural world though a physical and personal engagement with the land, working with nature to reflect its impermanence and the changing processes of time. This new publication offers an opportunity to consider how Long’s work is situated today, and marks an important moment to celebrate a career spanning six decades and a lifetime’s engagement with landscape through journeys made around the world.