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1977Richard Long Bushwood circle Stone line
Download education notes (PDF 7pp) Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Visit the Adobe website to download a free copy. I like simple, practical, emotional, quiet, vigorous art. I like the simplicity of walking. Richard Long, Five six pick up sticks, Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London 1980 Long’s art was biodegradable before anyone used the word. It remembers the first human marks, so simple they seem part of nature – megalithic mounds, stone circles. Jonathan Jones, ‘A hymn of love to the earth’, Guardian, 3 June 2009 |  By the time he came to Australia at the invitation of John Kaldor in 1977, Richard Long had started making works – including a series of 100 mile walks – in different locations around the world. Creating A straight hundred mile walk in Australia, he had no particular destination in mind when he set out. He caught the train from Sydney to Perth and simply got off when he saw country that he thought was suitable. Walking for Long has enabled him to extend the boundaries of sculpture. The length of the journey and the time it takes him, solitariness and isolation, become elemental variables in this form of art. Stones are used as markers of distance or time; and become part of a huge yet anonymous work. Most of the artist’s longer walks are measured by days and nights, by solar time. The walk he took in Australia, outside Broken Hill in NSW, was made daily, with him returning to the same campsite each night; the hundred miles refers to the cumulative total. This resulted in a series of photographs of the same name. On the walk he also created A line in Australia – a line of red stones in a now unknown location, recorded as a colour photograph. The stones he saw as grains of sand in a vast space of the landscape. Long’s work, like nature, can be ephemeral or permanent. For his Kaldor project, Long also made site-specific works for the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Stone line (now in the Art Gallery of NSW collection) was made from blue metal stone sourced by the artist from a Parramatta quarry and hand placed by him along the Gallery’s entrance court. Bushwood circle was made from gum and tea tree branches Long found outside Melbourne, which he placed to form a giant circle in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Murdoch Court. Long also made a work for John Kaldor at this time from pieces of driftwood collected around the foreshores of the Lane Cove River, near the Kaldor house. Sydney Harbour driftwood is part of the John Kaldor Family Gift to the Art Gallery of NSW in 2011. Read more about Richard Long. Richard Long's Stone Line 1977 in the entrance gallery of the Art Gallery of NSW. Photo: Kerry Dundas | WORLD EVENTSElvis Presley found dead Release of Star Wars, directed by George Lucas, launching the epic film franchise Disco music becomes the rage Train derailment in the Sydney suburb of Granville kills 83 people Walter De Maria installs The New York earth room in New York and The lightning field in New Mexico Exhibition of earth art opens at the Hirschorn Museum, Washington DC The work of Australian landscape painter Fred Williams exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York 6th Kaldor project Sol LeWitt’s Wall drawings installed at the Art Gallery of NSW and Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria 7th Kaldor project Richard Long creates A straight hundred mile walk in Australia and A line in Australia near Broken Hill as well as Bushwood circle at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria and Stone line at the Art Gallery of NSW | ||
