Making tracks

Going round in circles may be a metaphor for going nowhere, but Richard Long has quite literally made it his life’s work.

His landscape interventions have had the artist trample across the earth’s surface, walking in circles and in straight lines, for the best part of 30 years.

The trajectories of flattened grass land and newly turfed dust tracks left in his wake have been documented in photographs that offer a snapshot of his fleeting presence, a signature stamp akin to a kid’s scratched declaration, ‘I woz here’.

As well as photographs, Long’s globe-trotting journeys are recorded in words. They possess the outward form of poetry, offering quotidian, even banal observations.

His mud paintings are often, as here, painted directly on to the gallery walls.
Here fat coils of mud, the consistency of watered-down clay, are repeated like patterns on a roll of wallpaper. His piËce de rèsistance is a huge, perfect circle, painted in River Avon mud and based, according to the press release, on the ancient I-Ching hexagram for ‘mountain’.

I admit I find it difficult to share Long’s nature worshipping vision, overlaid as it is with so much mysticism.

Here we have an elliptical circle formed of Norfolk flint and chalk. It might look very nice in some landscaped garden or wild nature reserve, but in the gallery setting — at least for those of a perhaps jaded, urban sensibility — it’s just a bunch of stones transformed into a highly marketable commodity.