Roger Ackling & Richard Long: HANDS ON, HANDS OFF

Roger Ackling and Richard Long met as students at St Martin's School of Art in 1966. Their first collaboration came ten years later in the shape of a cycle ride by tandem through France, a shared experience that led to each artist creating individual bodies of work. It took another thirty years for their friendship to result in a collaboration towards a shared artwork, but in the summer of 2006 this happened not once, but many times: Ackling working in Norfolk, Long in Somerset, each man making his mark before sending it to the other. The resulting body of work was shown at Ingleby Gallery this summer alongside individual works by both artists. Richard Long's work was simultaneously the subject of a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, from June to October, 2007.