Bilbao Circle

To create his art, Richard Long walks for days, even weeks at a time, traversing great distances through uncultivated areas of land. While walking, Long interacts with the landscape by creating modest sculptures from indigenous materials. These circles or lines are eventually dissolved by the wind, rain, and rising tides. Subsequent to these walks, Long translates his deeply personal experiences in the wilderness into sculptures and mud drawings created for exhibition spaces and private collections. Pieces composed of flint, slate, feathers, pine needles, sticks, and other rustic materials become metaphors for the paths taken on his ramblings. The sculptures are not, therefore, representations of nature per se, but rather aesthetic documents of Long's engagement with the land and poetic evocations of the beauty and grandeur of the earth. Originally created for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2000, Bilbao Circle is made of slate stones quarried in historic Delabole, a village in Cornwall. By walking around the sculpture, viewers reenact in part the artist's own perambulations.