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 Room 5: Roads and Paths 

Warm Dead Bird, Ribadesella to Malaga Winter 1990 © Hamish Fulton

Roads and paths have been a recurring motif in Fulton's work. He has walked on paths, roads and pavements and his work often draws attention to this. Fulton asks us to focus on the overlooked: the ground on which we walk and the routes we take through the landscape.

Fulton has made a number of walks along pilgrimage routes in the UK, Spain and Japan. In 1971 he walked along the ancient pilgrims' route between Winchester and Canterbury. This walk is represented here by the small photo-text work.

Winter Solstice Full Moon, The Pilgrim's Way 1991 repeats this walk. On this second occasion Fulton altered his experience of the journey by walking continuously, without sleep. He was accompanied for the last 50 miles by Peter Fitzpatrick. 'After the second night of walking without sleep my chemistry was affected and I started to hallucinate - I 'changed' the landscape without handling it.' The fact that this experience is not referred to in the work points to the impossibility of the viewer ever knowing what the artist has actually experienced.

The large photographic work, Warm Dead Bird, Ribadesella to Malaga Winter 1990, evokes a walk made through Spain with fellow artist Richard Long. It represents a new development in Fulton's work, combining the scale of the wall works with photography. Text and image seem unrelated to each other, thus eliciting a complex response from the viewer. The statement 'walking against the oncoming traffic' is made strange by being placed over an image of a barren landscape and an empty road - during the walk Fulton followed main roads and passed through busy towns as well as empty countryside - while the suggested encounter with a dead bird is somehow shocking for the scale and bluntness of the text, and the word 'warm'.