Five, Six, Pick Up Sticks

I like simple, practical, emotional, 

quiet, vigorous art. 

I like the simplicity of walking, 

the simplicity of stones. 

I like common materials, whatever is to hand, 

but especially stones. I like the idea that stones 

are what the world is made of. 

I like common means given the simple twist of art. 

I like sensibility without technique. 

I like the way the degree of visibility 

and accessibility of my art is controlled 

by circumstance, and also the degree to which 

it can be either public or private, 

possessed or not possessed. 

I like to use the symmetry of patterns between time, 

places and time, between distance and time, 

between stones and distance, between time and stones. 

I choose lines and circles because they 

do the job. 

My art is about working in the wide 

world, wherever, on the surface of the earth. 

My art has the themes of materials, ideas, 

movement, time. The beauty of objects, thoughts, places 

and actions. 

My work is about my senses, my instinct, my own scale 

and my own physical commitment. 

My work is real, not illusory or conceptual. 

It is about real stones, real time, real actions. 

My work in not urban, nor is it romantic. 

It is the laying down of modern ideas in 

the only practical places to take them. 

The natural world sustains the industrial world. 

I use the world as I find it. 

My art can be remote or very public, 

all the work and all the places being equal. 

My work is visible or invisible. It can be an 

object (to possess) or an idea carried out and equally 

shared by anyone who knows about it. 

My photographs are facts which bring the 

right accessibility to remote, lonely 

or otherwise unrecognisable works. Some sculptures 

are seen by few people, but can be known by many. 

My outdoor sculptures and walking locations 

are not subject to possession and ownership. I like the fact 

that roads and mountains are common, public land. 

My outdoor sculptures are places. 

The material and the idea are of the place; 

sculpture and place are one and the same. 

The place is as far as the eye can see from the 

sculpture. The place for a sculpture is found 

by walking. Some works are a succession 

of particular places along a walk, e.g. 

Milestones. In this work the walking, 

the places and the stones all have equal importance. 

My talent as an artist is to walk across 

a moor, or place a stone on the ground. 

My stones are like grains of sand in the 

space of the landscape. 

A true understanding of the land requires 

more than the building of objects. 

The sticks and stones I find on the land, 

I am the first to touch them. 

A walk expresses space and freedom 

and the knowledge of it can live 

in the imagination of anyone, and that 

is another space too. 

A walk is just one more layer, a mark, laid 

upon the thousands of other layers of human 

and geographic history on the surface of the 

land. Maps help to show this. 

A walk traces the surface of the land, 

it follows an idea, it follows the day 

and the night. 

A road is the site of many journeys. 

The place of a walk is there before the 

walk and after it. 

A pile of stones or a walk, both 

have equal physical reality, though 

the walk is invisible. Some of my 

stone works can be seen, but not 

recognised as art. 

The creation in my art is not in the common 

forms – circle, lines – I use, but the 

places I choose to put them in. 

Mountains and galleries are both 

in their own ways extreme, neutral, uncluttered; 

good places to work. 

A good work is the right in thing in the right 

place at the right time. A crossing place. 

Fording a river. Have a good look, sit down, take off boots 

and socks, tie socks on to rucksack, put on boots, wade 

across, sit down, empty boots, put on socks and boots. It’s 

a new walk again. 

I have in general been interested in using the 

landscape in different ways from 

traditional representation and the fixed view. 

Walking, ideas, statements and maps are some means to 

this end. 

I have tried to add something of my own view as an 

artist to the wonderful and undisputed traditions 

of walking, journeying and climbing. Thus, some 

of my walks have been formal (straight, 

circular) almost ritualised. The patterns of 

my walks are unique and original; they 

are not like following well-trodden routes 

taking travellers from one place to another. 

I have sometimes climbed around mountains 

instead of to the top. I have used riverbeds 

as footpaths. I have made walks about slowness, walks 

about stones and water. I have made walks within 

a place as opposed to a linear journey; 

walking without travelling. 

Words after the fact. 

Richard Long 

Five, six, pick up sticks 

Seven, eight, lay them straight [1980]