Long Walks

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If someone were to ask you where the River Avon is, would you know the answer? The pioneer of Land Art, Richard Long didn’t only enrich my aesthetic eye today. The outing to The Modern Art Gallery turned into an enlightening lesson on British and world geography.

For most going on a walk is a form of relaxation: appreciate the scenery and take your nine-to-five desk legs out for a few hours. For Long, walking is his life. I overheard a fellow visitor summarise the extensive exhibition - a mix of drawings, installations, text and photographic work - saying “it is asthough he woke up one morning and said he was going to walk the earth.” In what better way can someone build so intimate an understandin of the environment we live in? The simple concepts behind Long’s work are an ideal foundation for the understated beauty of his drawings and documentation.

Across the three rooms, Long has created various temporary installations. The first is a wall drawing, a direct result of a spontaneous throw of silted mud at the gallerys’ white walls. Developed from earlier primitive mud drawings this cascading piece illuminates his shrewd exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and forces. Gravity pulls the watery mixture down the wall forming sensitive uncontrolled lines resembling the bed of a river in portrait. Knowing that in October, these pieces will be absolutely painted over, echoes Long’s many environmental works, which sit on the land evolving with its minder.

Undoubtedly the slate installation in the largest of exhibition spaces is the most powerful piece. The vast room is flooded with natural light, a perfect interior setting for Long’s elemental materials. The formation of the slate resembles a hefty dinning table. These weighty components exude a noble ambience commanding the prestigious space deftly.

Long’s numerous finger print drawings carry a lighter resonance. Although the message is clear - it is a statement about man’s mark on the environment - the pieces have an aesthetic consideration which removes a little of the poetic honesty evident in his more explicit works.

Journal entries documenting his travels give the audience further food for thought, the rooms murmering with the whispers of the intrigued.

This exhibition prides itself on its accessibility: a down to earth communication of one man’s relationship with the world. Long clearly outlines the reasons many of us romanticise about travelling the globe, map in hand; going wherever the wind blows.