Ideas into Action 1965–1980

Richard Long CBE, Turf Sculpture  1967

Long finished this work in Bristol in his second year on the Advanced Course. He cut the soil, removing the turf segments and configured its formal arrangement before making a photographic record. The cut turf was then relayed so that the segments would grow back into the earth.Critics have noted a connection between Long’s arrangement of the turf and the basic geometric shapes that characterised the formalist work of tutors such as Anthony Caro. Long has refuted this view by explaining the significance of the archetypal natural forms and the ephemerality of this intervention.

Gallery label, May 2007

Janet Nathan, Zeloso  1979

Janet Nathan’s constructions are made from a range of found objects. She collected driftwood, resin and painted wood from skips or from the shoreline, most often along the River Thames. Coastlines were an important source of inspiration for the artist, both in terms of materials and subject matter. The work’s asymmetrical arrangement forms a cross shape, a recurring symbol in the artist’s practice. Although apparently abstract at first glance, the work could evoke the form of a dock, jetty or mudflat.

Gallery label, January 2025

Carole Gibbons, Persephone  1969

Richard Long CBE, Turf Circle  1966

In Richard Long’s Turf Circle, he makes lines in a circle marked in the earth which meet at its centre. This act of joining one point to another is not only fundamental to the process of drawing, but also map-making. This work exemplifies Long’s belief in the importance of our encounters with the land to the origins of art. Long has continued to explore these ideas in his work, using the forms of spirals, concentric rings and parallel lines to examine every possible means of making marks in nature.

Gallery label, January 2026

Richard Long CBE, England 1968  1968

Richard Long leaves the studio to create work in outdoor settings. During walks he subtly marks his presence. In the works represented here, he records a temporary impression on turf and picks daisies along two lines to form an ‘X’. These interventions won’t last, but are made permanent in the form of photographs. ‘These works are of the place, they are a rearrangement of it and in time will be reabsorbed by it. I hope to make work for the land, not against it,’ he said.

Gallery label, September 2023

John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17” 2002) (Time Signature 5:1)  1972

This work comprises a wooden board painted white and covered with black flecks of paint. It is a part of a series of ‘One Second Drawings’ which John Latham began in 1970, each produced by spraying black paint onto a white board for one second. Through this simple act, Lathan aimed to represent his concept of a ‘least event’, which is the shortest departure from a state of nothingness. The numerical sequence in the title (17” 2002) records the time the work was executed: the 17th second of the 20th minute of the second hour.

Gallery label, January 2025

Alexis Hunter, Approach to Fear: XVII: Masculinisation of Society - exorcise  1977

Approach to Fear: XVII: Masculinisation of Society – exorcise 1977 is a unique photographic work comprising ten photographs mounted in two rows of five on two horizontal panels. From top left to bottom right, the images depict a hand casting a shadow over and then smearing black paint onto the image of the muscular body of a naked man. The man’s head is partially cropped so that only the lower half of his face can be seen, and his feet are also cropped out of the frame. The series of photographs shows different stages in the smudging of paint across the man’s body, starting from the area of the genitalia and progressively covering a good proportion of the image. The subtitle Masculinisation of Society – exorcise suggests that the work records the performance of an exorcism to counteract the worshipping of physical attributes championed in the mass media as virile and desirable.

Monica Sjöö, Housewives  1973

Sir Don McCullin CBE, Northern Ireland, The Bogside, Londonderry  1971, printed 2013

Sir Don McCullin CBE, A Jubilant Catholic Youth After Stoning British Soldiers, The Bogside, Londonderry, Northern Ireland  1971, printed 2013

Sir Don McCullin CBE, British Soldiers in The Bogside, Londonderry, Arresting a Catholic Youth  1971, printed 2013

Sir David Wilkie, The Peep-o’-Day Boys’ Cabin, in the West of Ireland  1835–6, exhibited 1836

Some of Wilkie’s most popular pictures showed life and folk traditions in rural Scotland, familiar from his boyhood. Later, in 1835, he visited Ireland, which he compared to Spain for its picturesque potential. He exhibited this picture the following year. It evokes the ‘state of primeval simplicity’ he found in Galway and Connemara, while underplaying the political and religious unrest implied by the title.Peep-o’Day Boys were Protestant guerrillas. They raided Catholic rebels at dawn, during uprisings in the 1780s and 90s. Wilkie had first planned a more contentious subject: a Whiteboy, from another group who championed oppressed tenants.

Gallery label, May 2007

Rose English, Harriet and Plait  1976

Harriet and Plait depicts the artist’s sister Harriet sitting in front of a window and wearing a long, plaited wig. The sequence of photographs captures the tip of her plait being snipped off and placed on a plate, resembling a triangle of pubic hair. Rose English took the photographs in the dining room of her mother’s house in Herefordshire. English strove to challenge traditional categories in art in her practice, moving from working with objects to events. In the early 1970s, she began to incorporate hand-made items – such as this wig – in staged settings that she would later photograph.

Gallery label, January 2025

Dennis Morris, Young Gun, Hackney  1969, printed 2012

Young Gun, Hackney 1969 is a black and white photograph taken in London by Jamaican-born British photographer Dennis Morris when he was just nine years old. The photograph portrays a young boy wearing a balaclava and holding a gun. The balaclava is striped, with a pompom at the top, while the seemingly young age of the boy indicates that he might be playing. Nonetheless, the gun that dominates the image is very realistic and the boy’s index finger is on the trigger, apparently ready to shoot. The image is disquieting in conveying a sense of both violence and play. In the context of its times it speaks of young black people angered by a society that did not seem to know how to, or want to, include them in its system, and of growing up in an age of confrontation, defined by racism and segregation on one side and growing black consciousness on the other.

Dennis Morris, Brother Can You Spare Some Change? Sandringham Road, Dalston, Hackney  1976, printed 2012

Brother Can You Spare Some Change? Sandringham Road, Dalston, Hackney 1976 is a black and white photograph taken in London by Jamaican-born British photographer Dennis Morris when he was still a teenager. Together with ‘Mother's Pride’, Hackney 1976 (Tate P14373), it is one of many photographs that Morris took of his neighbourhood in Dalston, in north-east London, in the mid-1970s. It shows a young boy walking through a desolate urban scene, one hand outstretched towards the photographer, presumably speaking the words of the title. A number of Morris’s photographs show the environment of 1970s London in a state of destruction, the social consequences of which he commented on in his book, Growing up Black (2012): ‘Many houses were being pulled down and, with them, the community. The houses were replaced by flats; it was a new era.’ (Dennis Morris, ‘Neighbourhood’, in Morris 2012, p.74). This was a tumultuous time for the newly forming black diaspora communities in London; the cultural theorist Stuart Hall has written that it ‘witnessed the birth, at the very heart of “the old country”, of “colony society”, with its typical inner-city, bombed-out and abandoned wasteland locations and scenarios, its physical and social deprivations in housing and living conditions, its indignities, casual violence and degrading humiliation’. (Stuart Hall, ‘“Speak Easy”: Black in the ’70s’, in Morris 2012, p.5.)

Gustav Metzger, Stockholm June: A project for Stockholm 1-15 June 1972, Phase 1 and Phase 2  1972, 2013

Stockholm June was originally proposed for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. In the first phase, 120 cars would be parked around a clear plastic tent with their engines running. In the second phase, they would be sealed inside the tent until the buildup of exhaust fumes created an explosion. Intended to draw attention to the devastating effects of environmental pollution, the project was unrealised.

Gallery label, January 2026

Donald Locke, Dageraad From the Air  1978–9

Dageraad was a sugar plantation. In 1763 it was the site of Guyana’s first rebellion of enslaved people. The painting evokes the plantation system that shaped Guyana’s history under Dutch and British colonial rule. The grid reflects the intervention on the land, sectioned by dykes and drainage canals. Donald Locke said: ‘In the Caribbean, the most dominant sociological event is the plantation system. I grew up at a time when the plantation system was still in existence. It dominated the sky; it dominated your life from beginning to end.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Romany Eveleigh, Pages  1976

Romany Eveleigh covered a sheet of paper with a layer of black ink, followed by a layer of white oil paint. Scratching hundreds of small circles into the wet paint, she revealed the dark ink beneath. The resulting pattern, which can be read as repetitions of the letter ‘o’, is reminiscent of text. The formation of the circles into columns suggests the pages of a book, with blocks of text and empty margins. Eveleigh’s use of the visual language of writing and printing was inspired by the tabloid newsprint pages plastered on walls in the streets of Rome where she lived.

Gallery label, January 2025

Richard Hamilton, Swingeing London 67 (f)  1968–9

Hamilton based this work on a famous newspaper photograph showing rock star Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser handcuffed together in a prison van following criminal charges for drug possession. Hamilton enlarged the blackand-white image and printed it onto canvas, preserving its grainy, blurry quality. He then made alterations, adding glossy foil to accentuate the handcuffs in the centre of the composition. Collaged elements seen outside the windows suggest a move from freedom to captivity.

Gallery label, January 2025

Keith Arnatt, Self-Burial (Television Interference Project)  1969

Arnatt was fascinated with works of art that are created in the natural landscape but leave no trace of their presence behind. ‘The continual reference to the disappearance of the art object suggested to me the eventual disappearance of the artist himself’, he wrote. This sequence of photographs was broadcast on German television in October 1969. One photo was shown each day, for about two seconds, sometimes interrupting whatever programme was being shown at peak viewing time. They were neither announced nor explained – viewers had to make what sense of them they could.

Gallery label, April 2009

Dennis Morris, ‘Mother’s Pride’, Hackney  1976, printed 2012

‘Mother’s Pride’, Hackney 1976 is a black and white photograph taken in London by Jamaican-born British photographer Dennis Morris when he was still a teenager. It focuses on the intimacy of family life, portraying a mother posing proudly with her two children in their home. Together with Brother Can You Spare Some Change? Sandringham Road, Dalston, Hackney 1976 (Tate P14372), it is one of many photographs that Morris took of his neighbourhood in Dalston, in north-east London, in the mid-1970s. The image conveys a sense of domestic pride, the title taken from a well-known brand of sliced bread, as well as a desire to build a life defined by family and community life not poverty and racial discrimination. In his book, Growing up Black (2012), Morris has written of the sense of pride in keeping dwellings clean and tidy, despite the often cramped rooms and shared utilities among all tenants of a property, at a time when landlords were reluctant to rent to black people and there were signs outside houses that stated: ‘rooms to let, no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ (Dennis Morris, ‘Dignity in Poverty’, in Morris 2012., p.52).

Gilbert & George, A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men  1972

Gilbert & George’s art is a form of self-portraiture, since they almost always feature in their own work. They have said that ‘it’s all one big portrait’. They see no separation between their activities as artists and their everyday existence. In 1969, they began to present themselves as ‘living sculptures’ and developed the mask-like personas that are presented here. The title of this work suggests a painting rather than a video, and the slowed-down action suggests the long, scrutinizing gaze of an artist examining his model.

Gallery label, February 2010

Rasheed Araeen, Rang Baranga  1969

Rang Baranga is made from an intersecting lattice structure composed of eight individual columns, each painted in a sequence of contrasting colours. The title is an Urdu term meaning ‘of many colours’. Trained as a civil engineer in Karachi, Pakistan, Rasheed Araeen creates sculptures that reference architectural and engineering structures as well as modernist art. In his search for stable yet open configurations, he found inspiration in nature, particularly in the movement of fire and water. Araeen was also struck by the sculptural language of Anthony Caro (displayed in this room), whose work he encountered after moving to London in 1964.

Gallery label, August 2024