Richard Long & Hamish Fulton.
As I move into the final weeks of the course and begin preparing for my return trip to Kingussie at the end of April, I have been thinking a lot about two artists whose practices feel increasingly relevant to the direction my work is taking: Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. Both have spent decades making work that centres on the relationship between the body, walking, and landscape, and while their practices feel distinct from what I am doing in some important ways, the questions they ask feel very close to the ones I find myself sitting with right now.
Richard Long has been described as pioneering a new way of understanding sculpture through landscape, one where the work is made through the relationship he develops with a place and his physical involvement with it. His most well known early work, A Line Made by Walking from 1967, was made by walking a continuous line into a field of grass in Wiltshire and then photographing the result. What strikes me about this is how simple and how complete it is. The walk is the work. The photograph is the record of something that already happened. Many of his walks are made visible through marks on the world which form basic shapes, lines and circles, rather than through constructions or new artefacts, and these works are of the place, are a rearrangement of it, and in time will be reabsorbed by it. There is something in that idea of reabsorption that I keep returning to when I think about my own paintings and their relationship to the landscapes that made them.
Hamish Fulton is often spoken of alongside Long, having studied at Saint Martin's at a similar time and developed what became known as walking art, but his practice is distinct in a way that I find equally interesting. Unlike his contemporary Richard Long, Fulton does not alter the form of the landscape he walks in, but records the experience through photographs and words. He has said that "if I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art" and has committed since 1973 to only making art that results directly from the experience of individual walks. The objects he exhibits, photographs, drawings, murals or wood pieces, are abstracted references to these experiences of walking, initially as markers of absence: they testify to an experience that has already passed into memory. What I find compelling about this is the honesty of it. The work doesn't pretend to be the experience. It points back toward it.
What is also significant to me is that Fulton has a specific connection to the landscapes I am working with. In 2010, Deveron Projects commissioned Fulton to create 21 Days in the Cairngorms, which included two group walks in Huntly, Scotland, continuing his engagement with the Cairngorms where he had previously created a number of walking works. Kingussie sits at the edge of the Cairngorms National Park, and the hills and glens I have been painting and filming are part of that same wider landscape that Fulton has returned to multiple times. There is something in that continuity that feels meaningful, the idea of a landscape that has drawn artists back to it repeatedly, each time leaving a different kind of trace.
Both Long and Fulton raise a question that I keep returning to in my own practice: what does it mean to make work in response to a place rather than simply depicting it? For both of them, the walk itself is the primary act, and everything that comes after, the photograph, the text, the sculpture, is a way of making that experience communicable to someone who wasn't there. That is very close to what I am hoping to do on this trip, both with the POV filming for the Unit 3 video and with something else that has been taking shape in my thinking.
In a recent 1-2-1 with Jonathan, we talked about the idea of bringing some of the paintings with me to Kingussie and photographing and filming them in the places that inspired them. The idea is to return the work to its source, to see what happens when the paintings are placed back into the landscape they came from and whether that changes the dialogue between the work and the place. It feels like a natural extension of what Long and Fulton are both asking in different ways: how do you make the relationship between a body, a place, and a piece of work visible to someone who wasn't present for the experience of making it?
Where my practice sits differently from both of theirs is in the relationship between studio and landscape. Long and Fulton are both making work in and from the landscape directly. I am making work in the studio, working from memory, photographs, and the embodied knowledge that comes from having been in a place repeatedly. Bringing the paintings back to Kingussie feels like a way of testing that translation, of seeing whether what was carried into the studio and worked through in paint still holds something of the place it came from. I won't know until I am there, but that uncertainty feels like part of the point.
