1996.283.005 FULTON
By Nina Miall
‘A Kind of Library’ May 2023
Hamish Fulton characterises himself as a ‘walking artist’, having developed his 50-year practice across photography, illustration and text works, based on the solitary experience of walking.
This work comes from a portfolio of prints that Fulton made to commemorate ten seven-day walks he undertook in the Cairngorm Mountains, west of Aberdeen in Scotland. He often walks familiar territory, returning to the same location to note seasonal or environmental changes. Here, Fulton offers a chronological inventory of his various encounters during a walk in what is one of the few remaining areas of wilderness in Britain, his expression ranging from the plain (‘dead trees’) to the poetic (‘a herd of deer sitting standing moving slowly running disappearing into the snow covered pine trees’). It represents an attempt to distil the experience of the walk, chronicling the journey and so functioning like the roadside cairns they sometimes record. The work’s communicative resonance comes from the steady accumulation of words testifying to the heightened attunement to nature that Fulton finds in the act of walking.