Silence Circle Big Bend Texas
- Artist: Richard Long CBE
- Date: 1990
- Medium: Photograph, black and white, on paper and typescript
- Dimensions: support: 830 x 1121 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is the “Silence Circle Big Bend Texas” by Richard Long, a 1990 black‑and‑white photograph that turns a stony desert slope into a deliberate void. The image shows a perfectly round clearing surrounded by thorny bushes, set against low, dry mountains in Big Bend National Park. Below the photo, the first two words of the title are hand‑written in red capitals, followed by a brief descriptive text in black capitals that reads: “a resting place on a ten‑day walk/ along the Rio Grande and in the Chisos Mountains/ Big Bend Texas 1990.” Long has made several such circles on walks across remote landscapes, most famously a circle of cactus branches in Malawi in 1978. For him, circles are universal, timeless markers of human presence, and making one by clearing rather than assembling leaves a transient mark on the earth. The term “silence” in the title hints at the quiet stillness that the empty space evokes, whether felt internally or by the landscape itself.
See it in person
Silence Circle Big Bend Texas is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
