Artwork "PETRIFIED WOOD CIRCLE" by Richard Long in Freiberg Cathedral

Location

A circle of petrified, densely packed pieces of wood, half cedar and half American redwood, without a plinth or border, measuring three metres, lying directly on the ground. Petrified Wood Circle is one of the iconic ground sculptures by Turner Prize winner and pioneer of British Land Art Richard Long, who was born in Bristol, Great Britain in 1945. The artist collected the material for his work, created in 2000, while travelling in remote places around the world and arranged it into a circle to visualise the layer "that lies on top of thousands of other layers of human and geographical history on the surface of the land." (R. Long, 1969) Long explains his traces of walking through the landscape, stones and wood that he aligns in a circle, a ring of handprints that he paints on a wall, or thinking about the changing direction of the wind to sculpture. His works embody life itself, they are personal and still, closely linked to universal, timeless forms of action, as well as to the earth that produces his sculptures and into which they will eventually return.