Ben Long operates predominantly within the public realm to produce art that stimulates social interconnectivity and enables diverse audiences to engage with his work. Focusing on British culture, he is particularly interested in reaching those people who would ordinarily have little or no involvement with contemporary art and gallery culture.

This ethos of shared experience and inclusivity is clearly demonstrated in The Great Travelling Art Exhibition, an on-going series of drawings made onto the rear shutters of haulage trucks. Using his finger to scribe into the layer of dirt built up from the vehicles’ exhaust emissions, Long creates the drawings, often travelling with the truck drivers to photograph the artworks in transit. Lasting a finite period, sometimes up to six months, it is precisely this impermanence, vulnerability and unpredictability that give the drawings their point of interest and contemporary relevance.

In Scaffolding Sculptures, Long constructs large-scale public sculptures using conventional scaffolding components. Inspired by the experience of working on building sites as a teenager, his approach to the project asserts both the value of a disciplined working practice and the playful conception of ideas. By comparing work of an artistic nature with the hard graft of manual employment, he attempts to democratize the process of creative production. Scaffolding sculptures, like the truck drawings, exist in a semi-permanent state. Using the scaffolding as a ‘sculptural kit’, Long is able to create new permutations on a regular basis and continually improve his skills in this unconventional medium.

The recently conceived Brass Bandstand project is an ambitious, life-sized reconstruction of a Victorian bandstand, the structure of which is made entirely from highly burnished brass. This architectural sculpture is intended to facilitate music and performance and unite the interests of the community, thereby completing the structure as a living, breathing artwork. The proposal for a full-size, fully operational brass bandstand is a gesture that attempts to revive and re-animate this familiar structure to its former working glory. In doing so, Long intends to inspire a new sense of civic pride and to memorialize and nurture a spirit of communal interaction.

The diverse facets of Long’s practice are unified by a clear aesthetic strategy in which he attempts to elevate the mundane and commonplace to the realm of art. He carefully selects the motifs and objects he works with on the basis of their mass appeal and how they register as cultural archetypes. The use of symbolism – the male and female of a species of bird, the concentric crown of a monarch, a red telephone booth, the image of a rearing horse – is encountered in British culture daily to the extent that it pervades our collective subconscious. The symbols that Long uses are particularly potent because they either stand for sentiments and expressions such as hope, love, power, or they imply states of being, necessary to human survival, such as communication, shelter, travel or work.

Long’s work is characterized by craftsmanship and technical skill that he attempts to hone with each new project. He deliberately uses craft as a device to increase the appeal of the work to a broad audience, and goes to great lengths to distinguish himself as the craftsman behind this work. It is in this role of artist as craftsman that Long brings a performance aspect to his practice, with the chance of his work being experienced during the creative act connecting him to other artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Keith Haring.

Ben Long’s diverse practice, in which the incongruous juxtaposition of high and low culture, art and materials becomes seemingly logical, unites people within a social framework and promotes the creative act as an integral part of daily life.