More and Less: the Early Work of Richard Long

Responding to the acquisition into the Leeds Sculpture Collections of a pot by Richard Long, made in 1965, this exhibition looks at work made by Long between 1964 and 1969: a time of tangential explorations, including his participation in the seminal 1969 exhibition Op Losse Schroeven.

In 1996 the Centre for the Study of Sculpture acquired a pot by Richard Long. Conceived by Long after leaving the West of England School of Art in Bristol at Easter 1965 and before starting at St Martins School of Art in September 1966, the pot was placed in the landscape, photographed, taken to London and then painted. For most people familiar with Long’s Work – his documented walks, his photographs, his circular and linear floor pieces of stone or wood and his mud drawings – the pot is something of a surprise.

The pot invites us to reconsider the artist and his work. It forces us to questions artistic process and makes us realise that artists do not work prescriptively – they do not start off with a style. The years between 1964 and 1969 can be seen as a crucial period in terms of the development of Richard Long’s work. Artists are often written about in terms of a linear process of artistic development; this exhibition questions that approach. For Long, these years were a time of tangential explorations, demonstrating an approach where nothing is fixed.

Alison Sleeman, Henry Moore Research Fellow at University College, London at the time, brought together a selective range of material that demonstrates the diversity of Long’s artistic explorations in the late 1960s, which included a group show at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam in 1969. The exhibition was entitled Op Losse Schroeven, which translates literally as ‘on loose screws’. The English colloquialism is ‘square pegs in round holes’. Neither translation fully captures the sense of urgency, the lack of fixity or the sense of potential change, that exists in the Dutch term. It is, however, a phrase appropriate to Richard Long at the time. There was a sense that he was on a precipice, that his work could go in any direction.

Hoping to recapture some of the excitement and edginess in that early period of Richard Long’s practice, this exhibition did not attempt to make formal connections with later works. That would be to suggest a predictability which is not representative of his work at the time. It is, instead, an exploration of a pivotal moment in time.