Private Collection

‘Finding Richard Long’ was a summer-long campaign in 2006 to locate places throughout Ireland where land artist Richard Long made artworks. This involved tracking local knowledge on his activities up and down the west coast, and close examination of photographs he took of sculptural arrangements he made of stones, rocks and other natural materials there in the 1970s. I found several in various conditions thirty years on, but his stone throwing around Carauntoohil mountain evaded me - who could ever find that stone after its intensive trip around Kerry?

In the context of the exhibition, I dedicate the piece to Kevin’s selection of Lou Reed’s 1992 album. Kevin showed the artwork in the gallery and believed in it as some kind of rupture into the Irish landscape tradition, long before anyone else would and despite the coarseness of the piece - ripping up other artists’s catalogues and finding often-abandoned and uncared for public artworks. I also like the idea that ‘Magic and Loss’ somehow touches on how we live in landscape, that we can never fully comprehend the richness of the world around us, and that art in all its forms might be the only way of getting remotely close.