Work
Several of his works were based around walks that he has made, and as well as land based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over. Long has been taking these walks since the mid 1960s where he has walked in places such as the Sahara Desert, Australia, Iceland and near his home in Bristol, United Kingdom. His work has proven to be revolutionary as it has changed how society views sculpture. His work has influenced the boundaries of sculpture to not be limited to only "traditional" materials and to be able to use alternative materials in his work. Not only is he using alternative materials such as rock and earth, but he also changed what art is, as the actual art piece can be the process of creating the art itself.
In his work, often cited as a response to the environments he walked in, the landscape would be deliberately changed in some way, as in A Line Made by Walking (1967), and sometimes sculptures were made in the landscape from rocks or similar found materials and then photographed. Other pieces consist of photographs or maps of unaltered landscapes accompanied by texts detailing the location and time of the walk it indicates.
His piece Delabole Slate Circle, acquired from the Tate Modern in 1997, is a central piece in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. The piece is nearly 2 metres in diameter and is composed of 168 pieces of slate that came from the Delabole quarry in Cornwall, United Kingdom. The piece can be configured differently, however Long has specified a few rules on how it should be put together. All pieces of stone must touch so that they can be locked together and stable, as well as the pieces must form a circle. The connection of the slates and the geometric shape illustrates a common theme that Long portrays in his work about the relationship between man and nature. Long explains, "you could say that my work is ... a balance between the patterns of nature and formalism of human, abstract ideas of lines and circles. It is where my human characteristics meet the natural forces and patterns of the world, and that is really the kind of subject of my work."
At Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the Marquess of Cholmondeley commissioned a sculpture to the east of the house. Long's land art there consists of a circle of Cornish slate at the end of a path mown through the grass. The New Art Centre in Salisbury is home to Long's Tame Buzzard Line (2001), a line of flint stones made to mimic the journey of a buzzard between an oak and an ash tree in the centre's grounds.
Permanent installations include Riverlines (2006) at the Hearst Tower in New York, US (at about 35 x 50 feet (11 x 15 metres) this was at the time the biggest wall work he had ever made); Planet Circle (1991) at the Museum de Pont, Tilburg, Netherlands; and White Water Falls (2012) in the Garvan Institute in Sydney, Australia.
In 2009, a retrospective of Long's work entitled "Heaven and Earth," appeared at the Tate Britain. In 2015, a major solo exhibition Richard Long: Time and Space, at the Arnolfini, celebrated his work in his hometown of Bristol.
