‘One gender disturbing message might be – in terms of both identity and place – ‘keep moving!’’ (Doreen Massey) [1]
During my studies, I readily took up what I perceived to be a call to arms (or legs!) from the geographer and social scientist Doreen Massey. My artistic practice aspires to trouble and revise patriarchal notions of space and womanhood that are pitched against ideas of masculinity through the inconspicuous yet nevertheless defiant act of putting one foot in front of the other. This is with a deliberate focus on what Massey calls ‘deprioritized and denigrated’, conceptually ‘feminine’ places. I have made a series of walking works following these themes, two of which I describe here.
‘Mind Where You Walk’
This walking performance took the form of an installation that occupied the entire stairwell of Liverpool Hope University’s bell tower. Nestled between bricks and beside banisters were carefully placed pieces of furniture and objects resembling small, domestic vignettes. The audience were invited to explore these snapshots of what were revealed to be my grandmother’s flat while listening via headphones to a soundtrack that relayed moments from her life. As a result, the piece functioned as a metaphoric, and in some ways literal, walk through my relative’s home and head. In this performance, walking was not only employed as an artistic output, but proved to be an integral tool in the creative process, helping me to navigate ideas surrounding ‘home’ while also settling upon my own definition.
Home is a key theme in this work. Part of my creative journey involved visiting the rural hamlet where my grandmother grew up. Guided by her instructions I traversed vast, open fields, all the while wondering how my footprints measured up to hers. With each step I seemed to sketch out my own figurative cartography of home over that of my relative’s one, filled with moments of discord and harmony in the ineluctable crossroads that formed out of two maps meeting. As such, my version of home was at once individual and familial, familiar, and foreign, yet able to be wilfully directed by the flick of a foot. By integrating sound recordings from my visit into the installation, I hoped to afford the audience the same opportunity to locate, shape and remap their own diverse version of home – ironically in and amongst the fixtures and fittings of my grandmother’s flat and through the following of her footsteps.
Gender is a second key theme in this work. Walking seemed an appropriate mode of engagement in my piece, also concerned with the socio-cultural and economic mobility of women. By having the audience climb the staircase while in-part metaphorically occupying the position of my grandmother, I hoped to enable participants to viscerally perceive the curbed spatial freedoms, or what Lauren Elkin calls the ‘invisible boundaries’ [2] that have historically attempted to demarcate space and delimit women’s identities. This idea was consolidated in the solitary walking frame on the top floor that figuratively and literally bookended the performance. While attempting to highlight the wounds or marks incurred at the hands of the patriarchy, it also aimed to demonstrate the radical marks women have made upon misogynistic conceptualisations of space, precisely by means of movement. Walking troubles easy divisions of spaces, places and bodies into binaries based on gender and instead shows the spatial and subjective to be continually in motion and in the process of being negotiated. As such, the audience’s pedestrianism served to simultaneously make them conscious of and actively contest gendered dichotomies of space by embodying its inherent dynamism.
‘Sea Sisters’
This immersive installation took the form of a makeshift hospital/shower cubicle housing a bath and a set of headphones. The work, with the aid of film, sound and spoken word, relayed the story of a close female friendship gained and lost by my grandmother. Developing the creative concerns of my previous work, this piece investigated the notion of inherited attachments to places and people as a result of transgenerational experiences and behaviours.
In the making of this installation, walking became a pivotal resource for performance material, both literally and thematically. By scouring my local coastline, stage to significant exchanges between the piece’s protagonists, I attempted to excavate the narrative layers and ghosts held in the landscape and also my body- itself an extension of site as well as a figurative ‘home’. As a result, the sounds, images and films I collected through repeated walks not only spoke of the traumas present in the terrain, but paralleled the scars found in my skin and subjective. When later woven into the performance by means of projection and poetry, these ‘scars’ or stories endeavoured to facilitate a change in the audience’s perspective by metaphorically enveloping and emplacing participants into the landscape from which the narratives originated. In this way, my work encouraged audiences to recognise their existence as innately spatial entities thereby able to reorganize and reinvent their identity along with the space they are part of. While ancestral traumas may haunt our notions of self and home, it is ultimately up to us how we view them and how they, in turn, are viewed. By paying attention to the stories and sites that surround us, we can curate and select the stories we tell ourselves and society about who we are and where we come from.
This use of walking to explore similarities found in the body and the beach was also productive in examining ties between imaginative geographies and conceptualizations of gender. Rather than exacerbating existing imaginings of place rooted in a particular version of femininity, my pedestrianism found and promoted alternative readings of ‘woman’- seeing her as limitless, varied, and thus a force to be reckoned with. These replacement understandings were communicated via the piece’s central narrative and ascertained from several imaginary walks with my grandmother. As she led me along the course of her friendship with a Jamaican woman named Trudy, my relative depicted the image of a woman at odds with traditional, patriarchal, frequently racist renderings. By incorporating this relationship into the performance, my installation aspired to put forward an idea of femininity inclusive of habitually othered bodies pertaining to different cultures and classes, that are also equally ‘woman’. Moreover, it attempted to suggest that through the formation of multicultural friendships, we can strengthen this revised notion of gender, imparting perhaps, positive models, imprints and impressions for our granddaughters.
[1] Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.
[2] Elkin, L. (2017) Flâneuse. London: Vintage.
