Hamish Fulton (London, 1946) is a ‘walking artist’ whose artistic practice results from the combination of two seemingly independent activities, walking and creating art.

Over the last fifty years, through hundreds of walks, Fulton has travelled the world by foot, observing and investigating its landscapes and establishing physical and mental links with nature. Committed to his determination to make art that surges solely from the individual action of walking, not on any fictional narratives or through the manipulation of mediums, the British artist transforms the irreproducible and unsalable walks into his artistic practice. Aside from this, for Fulton the artistic object is not the act of walking itself, nor are his works a representation thereof, instead his works —photographs, small wooden sculptures, drawings, installations and artist books, among others— are the materialization of the ephemeral and spiritual experiences he encounters during his walks, which sometimes are just a day long and other times last weeks or even months.

In 1969, after studying at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London, Fulton initiated his walks through different regions of the world. He has walked the Spanish peninsula coast to coast on various occasions, visited North America, Mexico and Australia and has walked across the Indian and Nepalese mountains, among many other places. His works document and trace the outlines of the mountains he climbed, the time invested in each itinerary, the names of the places he visited or the dates on which the walk took place, conceptually they are a reflection of our current lifestyle. The aesthetic dimension of his work resides in the use of images and text, on occasions in conjunction and in others apart, which translate the intangible and irreproducible experience of this journeys, his photographs are not conceived to represent or describe the landscape but to connect the spectator with the motives and circumstances that have caught Fulton’s interest during his walks. In his images, Fulton presents nature as is, without any intervention and generally without human presence. On occasions the artist has decided to accompany his photos with phrases or annotations of ideas that surged during the course of the walk, alluding to the place in which he was at the time or to the thoughts that his surroundings stirred up. While in his first works language was an accessory to the image, in the 1980s Fulton started experimenting with works that were mainly textual, whose evocative power invites the spectator to place him or herself in the space and time of the artist’s journey.

Coming out of the artistic post-conceptual currents that surged in the mid 1960s, Fulton’s work is hard to pinpoint. As opposed to other artists whose works centre around nature or landscapes, Fulton establishes a singular relation with the space, leaving no traces of his walks in the work, nor intervening, altering, or aspiring to contain it. This also marks the difference in his practice to those artists attributed to the Land-art movement, for whom the intervention in space and durability were essential characteristics. For Fulton his pilgrimages are symbolic and ritualistic acts that surge from a deep respect for nature.

Hamish Fulton’s art works are part of important museum collections such as the Tate Gallery (London, UK), the MoMA (New York, US), the LACMA (Los Angeles, US), the Museo Serralves (Oporto, PT), the Australian National Gallery (Canberra, AU), the MOMAT (Tokio, JP) or the Guggenheim (Nueva York, US), among others. Moreover, his works have been exhibited in art centers and institutions around the world, in solo show as well as in group exhibitions. Among those, stand out exhibitions at the Museo Serralves of Oporto, the Tate Britain in London, the Bawag Foundation of Viena and the Haus Konstriktiv of Zurich, as well as many other group shows.