Sharing A Long Walk…
The main medium of Richard Long’s landscape art is the land itself
After three previous nominations, Richard Long was awarded the 1989 Turner Prize. Unusually, the prize was given to him on the strength of his body of work to date, not for a single specific work. This reflects the context of his oeuvre that spans the globe in distance and could also be interpreted as spanning a timeline of geological epochs.
One of his earliest significant works was created in 1964, when he drew a meandering line across a field of snow by rolling a large snowball, creating a form common in nature — the sphere — whilst at the same time leaving behind it a negative form of bare earth that tracked his path. The negative space was physically represented in the accumulated snow as was the time and motion expended in its creation. Not only was this a physical response to the formal aspects of the land, its contours and textures, but also relied on seasonal and transient processes of precipitation… it was also a low impact intervention that wold leave little or no lasting trace in the environment itself…
Central to his work is the walk — a simple action of walking in the landscape, the path he follows making a conceptual drawing through time and space. He then records and expresses his responses to this interaction with his environment…
