Richard Long: The Art of Leaving a Trace

Richard Long has spent six decades making art from direct encounters with the landscape.

He walks through it, works with materials found in it, and finds ways to give those experiences a form. Sometimes the result is temporary; elsewhere it becomes a photograph, a text work or something made directly on paper.

A Line Made by Walking (1967) remains one of the clearest early expressions of this approach. While still a student, Long repeatedly walked backwards and forwards across a field until his footsteps left a visible line in the grass, which he then photographed. It was a remarkably economical gesture, but one that helped establish the direction of a practice in which an action in the landscape could constitute the work itself.

That economy has remained characteristic of Long’s work, although the means have developed. Stone, mud and water appear alongside maps and printed images; the circle and the line also return but in different forms. What can look very simple at first is usually the result of a very specific action or encounter with a material.

This is also what makes Long’s editions and works on paper so interesting. They are not simply reproductions of sculptures or artworks made elsewhere. Print and paper have been part of his practice since early in his career: MoMA’s collection includes Dartmoor Walks from 1972, made as a screenprint and lithograph, as well as later unique works in which mud is applied directly to paper. They allow the ideas and physicality of the wider practice to exist in a form that, luckily for us, can be lived with and enjoyed on the wall at home.

The selection below brings together a fantastic variety of editions and works on paper from different points in Long’s illustrious career.