“My materials are elemental; stone, water, mud, days, nights, rivers, sunrises. And our bodies are elemental; we are animals, we make marks, we leave traces, we leave footprints.”
— Richard Long

Richard Long (b.1945) is one of Britain’s most notable living artists. His wide ranging practice encompasses sculpture, texts, photographic documentation, site specific interventions, wall drawings, works on paper, canvas or wood and is often characterised by the walks he makes all over the world.

Sometimes ‘the artwork’ remains in the landscape or exists only as a document of an intervention, other times the material of the landscape is brought back to the gallery or the studio. In this work, china clay has been drawn from vast quarries in St Austell, Cornwall and the mud has been sourced directly from the River Avon in Bristol where the artist lives. These materials are applied to the canvas with a vigour that calls to mind the expeditions themselves. Long differentiates the china clay from the mud only in as much as ‘it’s good to use white sometimes, it looks good. It gives me another option, another variation.’

His works are included in the permanent collections of Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, amongst others.