Richard Long is a British land artist. His formative piece A Line Made By Walking, was made in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.

South Bank Circle brings together unevenly shaped pieces of slate in the geometric structure of a circle, and illustrates a theme common in Long’s work: the relationship between man and nature. As he has explained, ‘you could say that my work is … a balance between the patterns of nature and the formalism of human, abstract ideas like lines and circles. It is where my human characteristics meet the natural forces and patterns of the world, and that is really the kind of subject of my work’ (source).