‘X’ marks the spot in Richard Long’s sculpture, ‘Four Ways’, which features large shards of stone arranged in a neat cross on the gallery floor. Yet, since all the stones consist of a single type of slate that comes from one particular quarry in Delabole, Cornwall, it also denotes an entirely different spot. And so the piece is really as much about dislocation as any specific location – about trying to bridge the gap between different, distant places.
For the past 45 years, all of Long’s work has explored this core, conceptual issue: how to represent, within the context of a gallery, the experience of another place – typically, a place within nature, one that Long himself encountered through the act of walking. You can see the various strategies he employs. There are works in which he uses natural materials, such as mud from the River Avon, which gets slathered onto large, abstract canvases. In other pieces he arranges text on the gallery walls in patterns and measured sequences, the words commemorating the landmarks and observations – both external and introspective – that punctate a journey. Finally, snowy photographs from Alpine and Antarctic expeditions document his temporary, in situ installations of stone lines and circles.
This is a pretty similar show to his hugely impressive, hugely popular Tate Britain retrospective a few years back – and if you enjoyed that, you’re sure to like these more recent pieces. But it also raises a slight concern, which is that such a well-trodden path, so to speak, risks becoming too familiar. While his one-track dedication is laudable, you can’t help but want Long occasionally to deviate, to search out some new territory.
Gabriel Coxhead