Walkings New Movements

Walkings New Movements
Conference
1-3 November 2019
University of Plymouth

Words that landed like arrows in slow motion
leading, pointing, pulling, pushing, prodding, provoking

1.
Simon Bradly and Ursula Troche
Friday evening

displaced
displaced objects,
displaced object,
the special found object of sheep wool
reborn in new places, next times
reborn through the telling in documentation
much like Ursula in her third age of life, third region of living,
wool and place.
next to the museum of found objects
in a pocket
a museum wall of cloth wrapping
a museum of international travel
in Simon’s pocket
a museum of tiny pieces
real, or so we’re told.

catalogued.
categorised.
experienced in the mind
and sometimes the hand

contrast of place
limpets on bollards

pla(y)ce

objects that activate places
places that activate objects

2.
Ami Skanberg Dahlstedt
Friday evening

Suriashi, Japanese walk
[creep, rub, sliding foot]
Suriashi
fingers and thumbs joined
palms on thighs
facing inwards
slightly
head held high and gaze, ahead,
eyes on a fixed point in the future
body leans back, slightly
into the ancestors
walk this way

a walk in psycho-physical space
a metaphysical walk
a metaphysical walker
psychic landscaping

a walk that respects the ancestors rather than the culture presented
influence of the ancestors, not the culture of their lives but the spirit of their lives
a walk of spirit

Daoist professional walkers, who walked to control the stars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doreen_Massey_(geographer)

3.
Geraldine van Haemstra
‘you only see the wind through what it touches’
Friday evening

extended appendages made from bits and bobs, sea debris-drift, with moving parts
connect the artist body
to the drawing media
to the drawing surface
plane and flat
connect the artist body
to the wind
connect the drawing media
to the rain
connect movement
to stillness

a collaboration with the earth, with nature, with wind

she called it
seismopolygraph

seeing through movement

in gale force 7 or 8

on the Isle of Skye, far from London home

a piece of canvas dragged through the wet land
displacing the rain and earth through osmosis and movement

an aeolian harp
that vibrated in answer to the wind

an artist
that vibrated in answer to her question
‘how to un-see ourselves, and the world’
that we may see with more than our eyes

member of the
Wilderness Art Collective

https://www.wildernessart.org/

4.
Jonathan Pitches
‘Handrailing – a route through mountain studies’

a long family
walk
that led to an academic
talk

Norman Nicholson – 1978, p33
‘it imposes an unnatural rule of proportion on our eyes
and makes us reject so much of what our other senses tell us’

the liminal spaces between a current position and an ending

an un-seeing
and un-ending

5.
Rosie Sherwood
‘Walking Towards Re-Wilding’
Saturday

‘Wild’ by Jay Griffiths

re-wilding is a term that has evolved as fast as the change required to call for
the re-wilding of the human
re-relating
re-connecting
re-storing
re-lation-ship of species to environment

Rosie’s re-wilding before drawing
‘can art speak to this varied and vital subject’ – RS
‘can drawing talk the walk’ – TR

title of work:
‘Forged: somewhere between Hayle and Hollywell’
Boxes containing a photograph and a cast of a found object in bronze
memorialising, cataloging,
her object becoming memorial
and her offering of hope

we live in a packaging world
everything is wrapped for preservation, of and in, time
including our fecund, wild selves

6.
Sarah Scaife
Saturday

Sign-walks

walks as transportation from and to

Ask, then notice

walks as ritual, highly charged in space and time
‘Flow’ Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

magical realism

threshold to the ‘self’
Guattari and his signs
Jung and his vibration, synchronicity, projection

to be listening within
without

looking as socio-political acts
looking as a means to re-enchant
to re-enchant…the world, life, education,

this conference is re-enchanting education

Doreen Massey

art is colliding the personal with the critical

PROVOCATION #1
Philippe Guillaume – Walker At Work

Walker At Workwearing a boiler suit declaring in letters embroidered by a machine
stitch by stich
step by step
Walker At Work
from Montreal
MIND THE GAP
performance of
MIND THE GAP
a reading of words in time to images
words of another person, another place, another time
sequence
order
structure
in blocks
MIND THE GAP

Performance

7.
ZOE LUND
Saturday
From working to walking
From quitting her job at a university to walk towards her authentic life path
a year of walking
until the winter, when she and her friends rest

leisure time was informed by work
drinking after work, going to events that relate to work, saving money and time – through work
all the time spent maintaining the, work
resting, recovering, recuperating, readiness to start work again
she realised, how you spend your time is the life you live – spend it well

mapping, recording, reflecting, sharing, being lost and hungry

8.
IAIN BIGGS
Saturday

Hugo Ball – left Dada
he rejected possessive individualism
saying goodbye to ego and hello to the unity of all beings and the totality of all things

wow

Deep Mapping
Mutual accompaniment
commitment to trespass
maximising belonging to the world

http://www.iainbiggs.co.uk/2019/11/walking-away-from-deep-mapping-to-mutual-accompaniment/

9.
YAEL SHERRILL & LIANNE MOL

B-Tour
http://www.yaelsherill.com/b_tour.html

Audio-art-tour
A guided tour as an artistic strategy

Dada (again) walks in public space
the guide
the walker

a mediation of experience
a mediation of place
a mediation of history

a guide to puddle watching
live guiding that gives puddles their own agency

10.
ALED SINGLETON

walking interviews Caerleon memories of 1960s 70s
Arthur Machen
https://www.swansea.ac.uk/cia/phd-researchers-the-centre-for-innovative-ageing/aled-singleton/

11. MICHELE WHITING

durational walks
return to nature
drawing from the physical and intellectual
drawing from re-enaction of the walk in materials on paper

a hingeing of walks together

drawing on meeting yourself through nature
the interconnected lines

art is to imagine what is possible
art is a call to live in relationship (with materials, land, nature, self with other)
art is to enmesh

words carry memories of walks back into the drawing, into the studio
dream snaps(hots)

thinking through the act of drawing brings picture of the walk into mind
materials are thinking too

feeling dew on bare skin

http://www.michelewhiting.com/drawings.htm

12.
LEAH LOVETT, DUNCAN HAY
Walking in Tree Time: the listening wood project

Phoenix growth in veteran trees
when a tree loses a branch, the roots re-organise themselves
they adapt
roots turn to branch
spaces occupy other spaces
move into directions
that regain balance
purpose
growth

https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/historic-environment-resources/veteran-trees/

walking with
accountability

walking beyond
human dominance

walking with
empathy

their work looks in the face of the limits of technology
technology that allows objects to become animistic – the sounds of trees become visible
technology translates, transmutes, transforms, transfers
mediated, or unmediated?

13.
TOM SPOONER
Post-modern sublime and the estrangement from nature

walking across places involve moving, exchanging

walking to know, to sense, to create community

the disembodied wanderer
disembodied from their self or from nature or from nature extrapolated into technology?

wo]man reconciling her]him self with nature

the estrangement from nature
because religion said so
because culture said so
because society said so
because the boss said so
because the bank said so
because the bills said so

because fear said so

nature is what we are made of

learning and becoming

the poetry in the plant

the romantics tried to re-enchant our relationship with nature

orient life to a relationship with nature, with yourself

becoming
agents for change
gaining
agency through responsive relationship

John Berger — ‘A drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at’

13. MONALI MEHER
Provocation
‘Backward Walking in Silence with Incense Sticks’

Monali Meher

http://www.monalimeher.com/

 

 

 

 

 

Looking for her with our eyes
she walks backwards
we follow
she holds our path
we hold some of her sight
bunch up close at road crossings
spread apart to meet the edges of wider pavements

she looks at us, one by one
she looks at the paving stones, one by one
we follow, one by one

we hold the walk together
we don’t know where we are going
she does but does not look there

14.
HAMISH FULTON
‘Words From Walks’


he spoke
from words that lay in a line
a path of letters on a page
a line of rambled thoughts
from days, many of them
a call to look at what art is
to name a walk, art
to speak a walking manifesto pitched on the edge of a chair

to challenge norms and gates
miles and silence
white walls and nodding heads

i was in awe
he gave me the words on paper
and a chat
and i thanked him
pioneer