This week: Duncan talks to artist and walker Hamish Fulton. Emerging in the late 1960s alongside artists including Richard Long and Gilbert and George, Hamish Fulton’s work began to explore new possibilities for sculpture and for a direct relationship between landscape and art, shifting the focus from the resulting art as an object on to the experience of the landscape. With influences ranging from American Indian culture to the subject of the environment itself, Fulton began to take short walks and take photographs to document the experiences of these walks. After a monumental journey walking 1,022 miles from John O’Groats to Lands End Fulton made walking the sole subject of his art claiming to then make “only art resulting from the experience of individual walks”. He believes that each walk has a life of its own, and this cannot be rendered into a physical artwork; as the artist says “an artwork may be purchased but a walk cannot be sold”. Fulton undertakes these walks by himself and so is the only person to directly experience them; however the images, photographs and text allow viewers to engage with the artist’s experiences. Born in London in 1946 Hamish Fulton studied at St Martin’s College of Art, 1966-1968, and the Royal College of Art, 1968-1969, both in London and has had numerous solo shows at various institutions, amongst them Tate Britain and Kunst Museum, Basel, and has exhibited internationally including shows in New York, Tokyo and Munich. Fulton’s work is also kept by collections ranging from the British Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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