lines in the landscape
~ LINES MADE BY WALKING ~ A Drawing and Walking Workshop, June 2018 ~
Ideas / Transient lines in the landscape
The title of this series of workshops might seem familiar.
In 1967, artist Richard Long disembarked from a train about 20 miles south east of London, found a flat field, and walked repeatedly across it, trampling the grass and creating a transient line where he’d walked, which would disappear after only a few days. He called this piece ‘A Line Made by Walking’.
I’ve always been intrigued by how ‘simple’ this idea was, yet also very progressive. Since Long walked across his field in 1967, many have hailed his work as a forerunner of Performance Art, and also linked it with Land Art, a movement which used nature as its raw material. His ephemeral piece has been described as in parallel with anti-materialist Conceptual work of the same time, which criticised the commercial nature of the art-market and a growing consumerist society.
But Long describes his work as simply “a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’”. Is it perhaps not very important to him what this work means in the art-world? To Long, it seems more important that it’s a simple interaction with nature, a way to make “nature the subject”.
Long’s trampled line in the grass is also a record of human presence, though a very brief and quickly fading one. Wherever we go and whatever we do, we leave little clues and small interventions in our surroundings. In our movements, we tend to follow the quickest, straightest and easiest route. A ‘desire path’ is a path made by repeated foot fall, and usually is the shortest or most direct route. You see them everywhere in both natural or urban environments. They’re the result of person after person taking a shortcut across the grass, or going through the gap in the fence rather than all the way around. The trails we leave are also records of thoughts, our will and intentions - our mind-paths spread out across the land.
Human will can also manifest in the landscape in walls, fences and borders, which declare ownership and mark out conceptual territories. There are rarely straight lines in nature, but we seem to want to score through the landscape with lines, to impose order and divide it up neatly. A fence is a supposed container of a person’s property but, as Amanda Welch’s ‘Lochs of Shetland’ reveals, in nature a ‘container’ is really a very insubstantial notion.
Richard Long’s ‘A Line Made by Walking’ is not a border line, or a desire path. It doesn’t mark a territory, or directly represent a way of getting from A to B. It exists for its own sake, and as a brief record of Long’s interaction with nature. As someone who draws, I’m perhaps slightly biased to think of ‘A Line…’ as a drawing in nature - Long calls it a sculpture. Perhaps this is because, as Amanda Welch suggests, sculptures spill out into the real world, they interact with real 3D space and to some extent resist the fixed and contained nature of the 2D image. Long’s line in the grass certainly wasn’t a work contained within a picture plane like a drawing (the photograph he took of it, the only documentation, also doesn’t come close to ‘containing’ the work). But I would say he was engaged with conscious mark making when he made it, which is essentially what drawing is. I think too that by thinking about drawing in its broadest sense, we can resist the ‘fixed and contained nature of the 2D image’, opening up more ways to think about how time, movement and conceptual effort are involved in drawing. It can perhaps also open up new ways of thinking about what drawing is. It is said that when we observe and draw a line, we are tracing where we perceive two different areas of tone to meet. It’s really quite an immaterial and transient ‘edge’. Thinking about mark making and drawing in this way I think can perhaps free our drawings of becoming to static and careful. The most important part of the drawing is not always how ‘correct’ we might perceive the finished thing to be, but the actions of observing and noticing that go on whilst it’s being made, the traversing and searching for the edges.
Shetland seems at first a place of untouched wild nature. But it is of course actually full of left overs and evidence of human activity. I took these photographs (above) where I plan to lead participants in ‘Lines Made by Walking’ - in the Daal area of Bressay, just up from the lighthouse. At first the fields here seem empty, but these lines and tracks can be found. I think the first picture here shows a buried wall or ditch, and the second a sheep track (a kind of desire path, its a route they take between grazing patches). Unlike Richard Long’s ‘Line…’ they are unconscious lines on the ground, made from necessity or convenience, but it’s very interesting to find these marks in the landscape, clues of former presences like crumples in paper. It reminds me of Amanda Welch’s thoughts on noticing the seemingly insignificant and arbitrary, how noting things at the edges of our attention can be very illuminating. These lines in the landscape only reveal themselves from certain viewpoints too. The land undulates, hiding and revealing things as you walk. Often it is only when we change our own viewpoint that we can see more, and see the form of things.
In ‘Lines Made by Walking’, we’ll be following some of these ‘unconscious’ lines in the hillside as we walk, and we’ll be noticing lines everywhere around us and drawing them. By setting ourselves a certain area of land, and a certain route through it to give our attention to, we can perhaps open up lots of possibilities to notice details. I hope that this activity will also help us to collect experiences without being too initially concerned about artistic intention or composition, or worrying about finished results.
Though Richard Long’s ‘Line Made By Walking’ was very intentional (perhaps it was nothing but intent, a route with no A or B, just a record of going), but I think it was also made to simply open up possibilities. The line in the grass doesn’t mark an area, delineate a border, or I think even contain or express (or impose) a particular emotion. In 1967, it opened up the possibility for Long to interact with nature on that day, and to create an impression in his experience that would remain long after the grass grew back. Long’s work also continues to inspire thoughts in us all this time later, even though we can only hear of it second hand - it spills out into real life. I hope that by drawing in the landscape in Bressay this June, we can also collect impressions from around us. As we draw, we create not only lines on the page to represent lines and forms in the landscape, but we create impressions or furrows in our memories too.