Richard Long: Heaven and Earth (Unabridged‪)‬

One of Shakespeare's most often quoted lines, from Hamlet, simply asserts that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy." The current retrospective at Tate Britain of the art of Richard Long, the first in London since the Arts Council's Hayward Gallery show in 1991, has been titled Heaven and Earth by Long himself, a phrase he had earlier used for specific works of art.

The phrase, implying complementary opposites, has been suggested by the I Ching, that ancient Chinese text which for millennia has guided explorations of change and stability, order and chaos, the seemingly random and the discovery of pattern. The sophisticated yet simple concepts behind the I Ching may well be an inspiration for three of the largest works on view: the great wall painting in Vallauris clay and the first room with its two huge wall paintings in River Avon mud, exploiting almost endless variations in density of tone and hue, dominated by light and dark ochres and browns so dark as to be almost black, shaped by the primordial forms of cross and line. The tidal Avon is Long's home river; he was born in Bristol, where he still lives, in 1945.