Spring Circle

In »Spring Circle«, Richard Long has arranged pieces of limestone of different sizes to form a ring more than five meters wide. With the stones marking a clear boundary which may not be crossed, the center of the ring remains inaccessible to us. Does this mean the ring is a metaphor for the static par excellence?

Quite the opposite: the central preoccupations of this work are movement, landscape, and time. Richard Long—a central representative of Land Art—collected the components of his sculpture while hiking through France’s Champagne region. Whereas in other works he captured the changes which his hikes left behind (for example a path trod in the grass), here he employs fragments of the landscape itself.

As such, the stones become memorabilia which refer both to the landscape and the people who move within it, transforming them into the material for his art. Richard Long thus gives new expression to the ancient relationship between art and nature.