The Bristol-born and based landscape artist Richard Long is staging his most comprehensive solo exhibition in his home city for the past 15 years. TIME AND SPACE, which opens at Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts today, 31 July, features sculptures, drawings, photographs and text works ranging from the 1960s to the present. In the accompanying publication of the same name, Long says the show is less a retrospective than “a selection of some of [his] favourite works”.
The artist’s enduring connection to Bristol and the southwest of England is a theme. Vinyl text works record early walks that he started or ended in the city. Long has also used a favourite local material, mud collected from the River Avon, to create a new wall drawing for the gallery, Muddy Water Falls (2015), as well as small-scale fingerprint drawings on driftwood. The title work, TIME AND SPACE (2015), is a room-filling floor sculpture made from Cornish slate in the shape of a cross.
In what he says is the “first time [he’s] ever remade a sculpture”, Long is also presenting an ephemeral piece from his student days, Bristol (1967/2015), on the gallery floor. This set of three concentric circles was originally installed on the Downs, the huge green space in the north west of the city where Long played as a child. An offsite Arnolfini commission, Boyhood Line (2015)—170m of white limestone tracing an informal footpath through the grass—was unveiled there last month. Meanwhile, an exhibition of Long's work is due to open at Sperone Westwater in New York (11 September-24 October).
The UK show is part of a programme of six arts projects marking Bristol’s year as the 2015 European Green Capital, funded by a one-off £745,000 grant from Arts Council England. These include Sanctum by the US artist Theaster Gates, a 24-hour, 24-day residency in the bombed ruins of a medieval church organised by the public art producers Situations. Temple Church will host musicians and performers round the clock from 29 October.