Artist Richard Long uses the landscape around him as his studio and sculpts into it, forming natural and environmental art works. He uses the medium of walking and connecting with the land as his artistic process. He connects his relationship to the environment and creates a dialogue with it that becomes the forefront to his work. He describes his practice by saying "it is art that can be made in solitude." This very much relates to the sense of work I want to make, work made in an internal and private space that can then be shared and projected into a more external one...
My art is about the landscape, but mostly what it focuses on is the relationship we have with space and the human imprint we leave behind on the spaces we exist in....I really want to investigate our relationship to space and the invisible ties we have with it. How can we exist through one another? The space through us, and us through the space?....
Long explains that he makes the work for the land and that the essence of social or human presence is not importnat to him. This very much made me realise that in my case, the human presence is the most important aspect to this piece, how we as humans sculpt space and use it to aid our lives. Even thinking about small things, like for example the places I want to visit in the world all hold traces of human presence. They hold monuments of human activity and show how other cultures have lived through out civilisation. Coming to think about it, I am actually quite scared by the presence of bare landscape, it is very over powering and strong. Yet I love the way we try to sculpt it, and make it into our home, into dwellings we can exist in. This is a very primitive process, we have been doing it since the beginnings of human existence. The places we live symbolise with our lives, and our death. The world is not just a place we live in, it is also our resting place, where our physical bodies lie. Our connection with the earth is vital to the way we live and is extremely personal, each person has their own home, their own external and internal landscapes.
Angkor, Cambodia and Petra Tombs, Jordan.
We create temples and monuments, create sacred spaces, we cultivate space and the landscape. Human presence can also be invisible, bringing ourselves, back into ourselves. In my own way I want to create the essence of a temple, a space to inhabit, a space to absorb human presence and to regenerate my public, to give them a space to experience their own resonance, and to sculpt the land as a way to heal our selves, to bring is more connected to the spaces we exist in, I want to bring the landscape back to humanity.
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