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Hamish Fulton |
Hamish Fulton does not make art by painting or sculpting or collage; he makes it by walking outside in nature. Since an artist can't display a walk in a museum, Mr. Fulton had to find a way to let other people know about his journey. While he is walking, he takes a few photographs and writes notes in a journal. When he gets home, he puts the photographs and the words together to give us a summary of his experience in nature.
In the title, Touching by Hand One Hundred Rocks, we learn about one thing he did on his walk. The photographs show us three of the rocks that he touched. Where are these rocks? The text helps us with that question: he was on Hokkaido, which is the northernmost island of the country of Japan. An atlas will help you find it! Hokkaido is very cold, even in June when Mr. Fulton was there. Snow still remains on the mountains, as you can see! What else do the words tell us about the walk? It was seven days long; he walked all day and camped out at night. One night he saw a full moon. He wants us to try and understand how he felt on this walk. Try to put yourself in his shoes and imagine how you might feel all alone, walking in this wide, open landscape.
For Mr. Fulton, the photographs and the words are both very important to the artwork. What if he had just presented a photograph? Would a lot of the meaning be lost? What if the words were used by themselves? Mr. Fulton feels that words alone, if chosen carefully, can successfully convey the full experience of a walk, but that a photograph by itself cannot. Do you agree?
Mr. Fulton signed these works in an unusual way. The Japanese language is made up of symbols instead of an alphabet, and he asked someone in Japan to write his name using those types of symbols. You can find his signature in the red circles at the bottom center of each image. This is another way of adding something Japanese to the artwork.