Untitled, 2006. China clay on scrap metal (from Agadez). © the artist

A major exhibition of the works of one of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists is running at Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Richard Long’s innovative and highly influential work has gained him a worldwide audience and the exhibition, Walking and Marking, is showing until October 21 2007, covering his entire career.

The first major retrospective of his work since 1991, it shows how his work and practice has developed over 40 years, expressing man’s relationship with the natural landscape surrounding him.

Long’s work is based on the walks he has made since the 1960s and consists of photographs, maps, drawings and sculptures, normally lines or circles, constructed from the places he passes on his way.

Cornish Slate Cross, 2007. © the artist, photo: Michael Wolchover

Long was born in Bristol in 1945 and studied at St Martin’s College of Art in London where he started making simple, ‘ritualised’ walks, photographing the traces he made behind, such as stones or flattened grass.

Since the 1960s, this approach, making walking an art form in its own right, has remained central to his work and he has made walks across the world, from regular trips in Scotland to more ambitious treks across the Himalayas and in Patagonia, South America.

The circles and lines, or paths, he began to make on these walks from the 1970s are made with common, natural materials and placed spontaneously, sometimes in hard to find places. Long photographs his journeys and the marks he makes and also uses maps and texts to give meaning to his art, which are also represented in the exhibition.

Firth of Forth Mud Arc, 2007. © the artist, photo: Michael Wolchover

During the 1970s Long also started to make sculpture of natural material in indoor spaces, keeping landscape as the basis for his work, and Stone Line, his first slate work from 1980, is also included. The work is part of the gallery’s permanent collection.

Long has also made a large cross-shaped sculpture from Cornish slate for the exhibition, which has been placed in the gardens to the rear of the gallery.

Mud often features in his work and Long has remade three of his large-scale mud wall drawings at the gallery plus several of his mud-dipped works on paper and mud-splash drawings.

He uses diluted mud like paint and carefully splashes it on walls with his hands or directly dips paper into the mud, creating extraordinary images from mundane material.