Richard Long describes 'A Line Made by Walking'
DACS spoke to the pioneering land artist who describes the conception and legacy of his seminal 1967 work, A Line Made by Walking.
To coincide with his major solo exhibition which opened at the Arnolfini in Bristol back in July 2015, this article was originally published on Artimage, DACS' digital platform for licensing modern and contemporary art.
A Line Made by Walking - words after the fact.
The work originated through intuition.
After it was made I realised it could be the beginning of a journey - a life line.
In the next straight walk I made, the line in the grass became a line drawn on a map.
I had the idea before I arrived at the place. I took a stopping train going south west out of London with no destination in mind. I got off at the first station in the first real countryside the train was passing through and found a suitable field easily and by chance.
The fact that over the subsequent years I have walked in straight lines for other reasons, over different distances, in different landscapes around the world, gives that work a real significance to a point of view which I have followed all my life.
Also at that time I was realising that to engage with the reality and space of landscape was the most satisfying and ambitious - physically and intellectually - way I could choose to make art.
Nature, the diversity of places, natural and cosmic phenomena, natural materials, movement, time and distance were to become my subject matter.
Richard Long, 2015.
About Richard Long
Richard Long studied at St Martin's School of Art, where in 1967 he created the groundbreaking A Line Made by Walking, which combined elements of ritual and sculpture. In the 1960s, his work was connected with the beginnings of Land Art, Conceptual Art, and Arte Povera. Since then, Long's work, based primarily from walking in landscapes, has combined photo and text works, sculpture and mud works. His art shows an abundant respect for nature, using simple shapes and organic materials. He represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and won the Turner Prize in 1989, and was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture from Japan in 2009.
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