Long’s work challenges the idea of what a sculpture can be. He describes it as ‘a portrait of the artist touching the earth’. He began to explore walking as art in 1967, whilst still a student at St Martin’s. He states that “walking - as art - provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience.”
The simplicity of walking as an art form is key to Long’s work and thinking. His art concerns man’s relationship with the environment, through simple marking, whether they be footprints, fingerprints or handprints, made with mud or water; or stones and sticks, picked up and rearranged to denote man’s presence in the environment.
