Richard Long

Richard Long’s 'Circle in Alaska' follows the geographical direction suggested by Marine Hugonnier’s 'Towards Tomorrow' and depicts a driftwood circle on the Arctic Circle, in the north west of Alaska, looking across the Bering Strait to Russia. It dates from 1977, a journey typical of Long’s reaching towards the remote edges of the world, on this occasion in the company of his friend and fellow artist Hamish Fulton.

The first work of Richard’s that we showed in Edinburgh was a circle of Dartmoor granite, in an exhibition titled Land in 2001, at a time when the gallery was on the ground floor of the Georgian townhouse. When the two weighty crates arrived, they had to be unloaded on the street, for fear of crashing through the gallery floor, each piece of wrapped stone carefully carried by technicians through the front door and into the gallery. Simultaneously, we were renovating the basement, demolishing an internal wall, which involved the team of builders carrying lumps of Edinburgh sandstone up the steps and into a skip on the street, next to which the crates were sitting. It was as if the building had become some kind of machine for transforming stone. Three years later we showed Richard’s work again in the exhibition From Here to Eternity – a 5m line this time – and expecting a work of similar weight and scale we sent a full crew of art handlers to collect the work in their largest vehicle. They were handed a small package, about the size of a shoe box, containing tiny sticks of willow. Richard’s great friend Roger Ackling renamed the exhibition 'Vermeer to Eternity'.