The Glasgow School of Art

Craig Richardson
'Landscape as Conceptual Art' watch video

The often controversial, artist John Latham (1921-2006) left an important legacy to Scotland. Latham's proposal - that the seemingly natural hill sites in Mid-Lothian, in fact a man-made by-product of 19th Century paraffin oil mining, were artworks of the highest quality - was sanctioned in the mid-1970s by the Scottish Development Agency, and has since entered the realm of myth and conjecture. The sites, which are best understood within a matrix of terms including landscape, leisure space and artwork also contain vital aspects of biological diversity and geological distinction. This talk reveals why they are comparable to the greatest land art works of the 1960s-1980s and an exemplar in Scottish post-war art production.

Craig Richardson studied at Glasgow School of Art, graduating from Environmental Art in 1988 and the MFA in 1990. He is currently Director of Postgraduate (Taught) courses in the School of Arts & Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, and Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee. His writings have recently appeared in Contemporary, Art Monthly and Map magazines among others, as well as in publications on Christine Borland, Thomas Lawson, and Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen. He is currently writing 'Scottish Art since 1960 - Historical Reflections in Contemporary Overviews' contracted to Ashgate (publication forthcoming).

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.