Hamish Fulton was born in London and studied at St Martin’s School of Art and at the Royal College of Art, in London. Both during, and just after, his time at St Martin’s, Fulton made several visits to the USA, travelling extensively, and began there to be interested in presenting landscape as sculpture, with the aid of photography. Unlike his contemporary Richard Long, Fulton leaves no formal mark or intervention on the land through which he travels nor does he exhibit works of art other than those captioned photographs, or more recently prints, which evoke his experience of the journey. Initially only one work represented each journey, with such extreme economy Fulton made clear that his photographs do not document the landscape nor record the duration, but rather aim to condense his experiences, functioning like the roadside cairns they sometimes record, as signs or mementoes of a human act. The communicative power comes from the resonant texts which accompany Fulton’s work; the texts are not an attempt to give a complete description: some give only selected objective details of place, time, distance; others have more subjective details of the artist’s state of mind. Of his work Fulton wrote in 1981: "I do not make sculpture in the landscape involving permanent alterations and changes to the earth’s surface, as my intention more and more is to be influenced by nature, and nature (the natural environment) is not man-made. My art is a passive protest against urban societies that alienate people from the world of nature."

Photography as Medium, The British Council 1981

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