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 Room 7: Recent Wall Works and Early Photographic Works

Crow Horses, Little Big Horn Battlefield, Montana, Summer 1969 © Hamish Fulton

The large scale wall works in this room represent recent journeys in North America and Canada. Fulton locates the beginnings of his art in the US, having made formative visits to Cheyenne and Sioux sites in Montana, Dakota and Utah in 1969. The Absaroka Mountain Skyline is derived from a sketch Fulton made in his notebook while on this twenty-one-day walk in the Beartooth Mountains. While the formalised drawing of the horizon evokes the vast space of the landscape, it also recalls graphs charting economic fluctuations, cardiographs, or the meandering path of a wandering walk. In contrast, this room also contains a group of small photographic works made between 1969 and 1971.

Made after he left art school but before adopting the maxim 'no walk, no work,' these show Fulton experimenting with different actions in the landscape and different ways of using photography to represent the physical experience of moving through a landscape.

He was particularly inspired at this time by visits to the Sioux and Cheyenne holy lands in Montana and Dakota. 'My interest in Plains Indians I think came about because of a feeling that their way of life was one that was close to nature.' In Fulton's opinion this is a quality that has been lost in much of contemporary Western culture.