Researching Walking as Art Practice

I want to know more about my own experience of walking. So I need to walk.

I want to contextualise my walking within existing ideas and existing practice. So I need to walk with others. 

It began with my MA dissertation. I knew I enjoyed walking. I was curious about the way my thoughts seemed to come into existence and flow from one to another in a unique way when I walked. My dissertation was aimed at trying to capture this mental state, understand it, and understand why walking made me think of the things it did. A distillation of this process can be seen in my lockdown adjusted video piece Solvitur Ambulando, currently on display at the 12 Star Gallery in London.

The further I walked, however, I found, in contrast, that my mind began to quieten down. And emptied. I stopped thinking, and instead focused on my tiredness. The weight of my feet. The pain in my back. And I began to wander and wonder whether walking could provide a way through the thoughts that dominate my work. A way through intellectual practice. What Fernando Pessoa as his Alberto Caeiro heteronym termed ‘a learning to unlearn’; a zen like repetition of the feet leading to some ultimate sunyata. The placing of emotion above reason.

My research question is now how do I explore this further, and how do I take this experience and convey it via visual art?

So I am going on a long walk across Britain to explore this further.

I have been lucky enough to be granted the opportunity to take others with me for a few days at a time. To talk to them. To observe them. To learn from them. To help me discover things I would otherwise have missed. To help me see things from another point of view. I am also searching out walking artists as I go. As I added more and more to the list and the trip got longer and longer, I thought ‘why not go the whole hog’? So I set out from John O’Groats on June 7th, and hope to arrive at Land’s End about 11 weeks later. My journey takes on another facet that has dominated my work: that of getting to physically know a land that forms so much of my identity. As the son of migrants I have always felt, in some way, disconnected from this land. Traversing the country feels like the right way to explore this further. I don’t ‘look’ English and this can come into conflict with ideas of who is allowed to walk and where. I look forward to beginning to interrogate this more deeply.

My companions will range from emerging artists such as Roei Greenberg who is interested in the political and social meaning of the landscape, conceptual walking artist Jamie Steedman, and landscape photographer Mat Hay, to Anthony Schrag who once walked from Scotland to the Venice Biennale, and to perhaps the most famous walker of them all. I also hope to be able to walk with Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst when I reach Devon, as well as walker and researcher Amanda Thompson up in the Highlands. And it is not just artists either; Land Economist Susan Steed and Forest Bather Stefan Batorijs will be joining me too to help me research areas of ‘non-art’ interest that feed into my practice. I am keen to encounter others on my route (found in my instagram stories) so if that is you and you fancy a stroll, get in touch. 

One caveat I always have to share with anyone that walks with me is that I have an unseen physical disability which I feel does not easily allow me to access Romantic, Rousseau-esque, experiences of walking. I can get frustrated, have to make constant stops, and get anxious. But that is the experience I am trying to explore further. An experience I don’t see represented in much writing and talking about walking.

I will make a series of posts to this blog as I go. Given words are thinking, this will challenge me to experiment with how to convey my experience in ways that are not predominantly text based. I hope you will follow my journey.

This walk is funded by Art Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant.