- Artist
- Richard Long CBE born 1945
- Medium
- 8 photographs, black and white, on paper and graphite on board
- Dimensions
- Frame, each: 276 × 276 × 10 mm
displayed: 276 × 2591 × 10mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 1983
- Reference
- T03808
Catalogue entry
T03808 A Sculpture in Bristol 1965/83
Seven black and white photographs mounted on board and one title panel hand-lettered in pencil on board, each panel 10 7/8 × 10 7/8 (276 × 276)
Inscribed ‘A SCULPTURE IN BRISTOL/1965’ on title panel and ‘R.Long’ on reverse of each board
Purchased from Anthony d'Offay Ltd. (Grant-in-Aid) 1983
Exh: Richard Long, Touch Stones: Words after the fact, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, March–May 1983 (not numbered); 1965–1972 When Attitudes Became Form, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, July–September 1984, Fruit Market, Edinburgh, October–November 1984 (not numbered)
In a letter to the compiler (22 April 1986), the artist commented:
Though not my first outdoor work (‘A Snowball Track’ 1964), ‘A Sculpture in Bristol’ was my first work actually digging into the ground. I wanted to make work both below ground level and in the ground. It was made in the garden of a derelict house at the time of doing various labouring jobs before I came to London.
The work consisted of a roughly circular hollow, a meandering channel or small trench, and two holes. The hollow and a part of the channel were lined with white plaster, the two holes were filled with plaster (one full, the other half full) and a section of the channel was just earth. The work was loosely based on rivers; sources, and inlets flowing into a lower riverbed (which can be seen in the River Avon. I had always been interested in the negative space and shape of the Avon at low tide). So the sculpture was made by digging, lining and pouring, and was a sort of fictional abstracted river system without water, or with the tide out.
The photos were taken casually, and only made into a photo-work, to my specifications, eighteen years later, for the occasion of my show at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1983.
Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1986
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