Walking Art
I practice walking and scoring and make connections between walking and creative writing; mark making the page with prompts, invitations, instruction, recipes, guides, experimental poetry, spoken word, so that others might engage with walking in artistic ways. I have written performance works inspired by walks and have taken international audiences through urban and natural landscapes, connecting with site through communal walking experiences
Image, Claire Hind; Walking to embody Mogamma, a Painting in Four Parts; Part 3 at Tate Modern, in Ways to Wander the Gallery, 2015. Permission; Julie Mehretu. Follow the lines and visual details of palimpsest
invent rules for direction
through space
become
an interpretation
a
composing body
moving
textures
How do you feel
walking body?
Layering
__________________________
ground.
The Wander Score
Published in the field of walking arts, I regularly collaborate with Clare Qualmann on the Ways to Wander books (Triarchy Press), and am Project Associate on the Walking Publics / Walking Art research project co-curating The Walkbook: Recipes for Walking and Wellbeing. I also collaborate with Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst on Walking Bodies (Triarchy Press) and some of my collaborations draw upon my practice of walking and dreaming, in relation to death and play in the book: Embodying the Dead, Writing, Playing, Performing (Bloomsbury).
Clare and I were commissioned by the Kansas City Arts Institute, in residency to develop a series of walking projects for their community of artists to connect walking to graphic design, long form poetry and visual data analysis. Our lectures and workshops produced a series of 3D Wander Scores housed in the KCAI library for loan. This has encouraged a culture of walking arts practice in an otherwise, car reliant society.
In exchange, we both scripted a live performance entitled Wander, Score, reflecting on a journey we took together across 7 days, spending time in specific sites of geological interest across the Lizard Peninsula connecting walking with writing and drawing for a premier of a live performance at Cast, Cornwall.
Wander, Score, the live work, reflects upon the thoughts of women walking and writing creatively, responding directly to marine debris and rock formation and erosion. The performance can be booked for the studio or, gallery.