Hamish Fulton sees himself as a ‘walking artist’. He often returns to specific parts of the Scottish Highlands to observe seasonal changes and deepen his familiarity with their finer details. The series ‘Ten toes towards the rainbow’ combines text and photography — both long-standing elements of his practice — to conjure something of his experiences.
Within his practice, Fulton also questions art’s ability to encapsulate the experience of traversing through unique natural environments. He has said that his works are cultural interpretations of his experiences, and while the works foster a greater appreciation of the natural world, the audience must do their own leg work to have the real experience.
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.
