Sounds of walking: Can sound re-present the embodied experience of movement time and distance in the landscape?

Martin P Eccles

In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.

Dedication and Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to Julie. Without her support none of this would ever have happened.

The friendship, interest and support of Jeremy Grimshaw has been a constant and enduring part of my art practice and this thesis; thank you.

I am very grateful to my supervisors, Bennett Hogg, Andrew Burton and Bill Herbert, for their thoughtful guidance throughout my work.

Prelude

By way of an introduction to this thesis, and to help orientate a reader, I offer a background (and some sort of chronology) to the development of my art practice, how I arrived at the start of this creative practice PhD, how it transpired that walking was an integral part of how I generate much of my art and how my walking had become a fundamental creative tool. Writing a prelude such as this offers linearity, an underlying logic of events as if this whole was guided by some sort of grand design. What is written is ordered with the clarity of hindsight and the truth is that much of it was considerably more meandering than this prelude suggests and that even steps that look sequential are more likely to have been the result of a more circuitous, iterative process. So, that said, on we go.

For as long as I can remember I have been interested in the natural world in general and birds in particular. Whilst my family were supportive of my interest—bird books and binoculars as birthday and Christmas presents—they themselves had no specific interest, experience or skills in natural history or birding, and we were not a family of walkers. Up to the age of ten, living in Stockton-on-Tees, our forays into the countryside took the form of weekend picnics (by or near the car) on the North York Moors, in Teesdale or by the sea, on the beach at Redcar. However, such outings became less frequent after we moved south to the midlands, and I grew into my teens; my outdoor time was spent playing football or fishing with my mate Alan on the local canal. My interest in the natural world continued at a general level until 1978, when, having newly qualified in medicine, I began working with Colin Bradshaw, who was to become a lifelong friend. Over conversations whilst on-call together, it transpired he was an experienced birder and, from a family of seven children, was one of five boys for whom birding was a skilful (and somewhat competitive) hobby. I started going out birding with him and my levels of knowledge and experience rapidly increased. It was through him that I began to appreciate that the sounds—calls and songs—of birds were distinctive and a way of identifying, or being alerted to the presence of, an unseen bird.

I had drawn images of birds for as long as I had been interested in them. This developed from initially copying the drawings and paintings of other artists—starting with the species illustrations in the Readers Digest AA Book of British Birds (Book of British Birds, 1969)—through to being an activity that was usually done outdoors, from life, with watercolours, in the context of variously long walks. Nurtured by various night classes and residential courses, it evolved into combinations of walking and sitting still for long periods but always with an ear to what was happening around me. At this point I was looking at the works of bird artists, such as John Busby and Lars Jonsson, struck by their portrayal of birds in place and, for John Busby in particular, by his ability to render the unseen—air, wind, light and movement. Jonsson had written and illustrated a set of field guides that were lauded for their capture of the ‘jizz’ of the birds—a pictorial representation of the sense, movement and behaviour of a species and was, for me, an introduction to the idea of the distillation of an essence of an animal.

I continued happily in this manner for many years, birding and painting, alongside working and family life with my wife and two daughters. It is interesting to look back on my professional career as a general practitioner (a primary-care physician for those not familiar with the UK term), with its focus on a taking a holistic view of the patient, their life, social, and psychological experiences as a route to understanding their illnesses. Such an approach is important in order to understand why the apparently same illness is experienced differently by different people—what a patient experiences is a consequence of not just the organic condition, but also the world in which they live, and how they live in, and feel about, it. With hindsight, although the language and names are different this has parallels with the ideas of embodiment—knowing the world by having a body, and the way that body interacts with, and in, the world—that I was to end up investigating as an artist. Thus my medical practice fed my art practice.

Through the interests and friendship of Jeremy Grimshaw, a close colleague and second lifelong friend who shaped this story, I expanded my listening to and awareness of different sounds—music. Over a period of 20 years or so Jeremy, juggling my sense of incomprehension, offered me suggestions for listening. I discovered I enjoyed jazz and, latterly, experimental music; a different context to my birding but one where again, I began to pay much more attention to listening. It was Jeremy’s suggestion that we visited ‘Every Day is a Good Day’ an exhibition of the works of John Cage, at the Gateshead Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in summer 2010, following which I began to think about, and to try to understand, the works of John Cage. It was also through Jeremy that I became aware of the discography of Chris Watson whose rich, orchestrated field recordings certainly touched on my interest in birds (Watson, 1998) but went beyond this in his portrayal of place and weather (Watson, 2003; Watson and Nilsen, 2006). I was becoming increasingly interested in the sounds of the places that I was making works in, and wanted, in some way, to work with this, but wasn’t clear how to start.

From around 2005 the pace of my art practice started to pick up. As our daughters became older and more self-sufficient, my art practice began to expand. Having experienced works by Andy Goldsworthy (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2007) and David Nash (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2010), I started creating three-dimensional works both at home and in the landscape when I was walking. From about 2009 I had been moving towards exploring post-early-retirement life as an artist and in October 2012 I started a Batchelors degree in Fine Art at Newcastle University. Looking back over the course of those four years, most things I enjoyed doing involved walking outdoors, and I began to work with sound, extended print forms, and poetry. So, as I moved into this creative practice PhD, it had become clear to me that walking was a part of how I generate much of my art; my walking had become a creative tool. But having found a tool and having created a set of ideas I wanted to spend time researching how I created artworks.

On to Chapter 1. Introduction

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Dedication and Acknowledgements

Prelude