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

www.hamish-fulton.com

 

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.

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