Chapter 2. A background for my practice

 

This chapter is a selective review of the various areas that my practice touches; it seeks to offer the points of influence and contact that I have come to recognise between my practice and theory, and between my practice and the practice of other artists, some historical, some current. This chapter covers firstly, how I think about walking—embodiment, walking and thinking, walking and solitude, and walking art and artists. Secondly, I consider sound—recorded sound and its use by artists who walk. Thirdly, I write about poetry with a brief description of Japanese poetic forms—as used by Matsuo Bashō and several current poets. I write about poets who have walked, and whose work touches on the durational dimensions of walking and conclude the chapter by considering where I walk—place.

2.1 Walking

 

My practice is built around walking and as I walk, I am in the world, I am part of the world, and I engage the world. I feel as I walk, I touch the ground and I move in the air, through Ingold’s weather world (Ingold, 2011, pp. 126-135). My walking is, as Tilley suggests, an act of ‘consciousness, habit and practice, that is both constrained by place and landscape and constitutive of them ... the medium and outcome of a spatial practice, a mode of existence in the world.’ (Tilley, 1994, p. 29). My walking is at the core of all my work. Ever present; slower or faster; quieter or louder; irregular or a steady march as of a drumbeat rhythm. My walking is a manifestation of my being, being the body that I am, the body that is my means of being in and knowing the world, the body that marks the distances I walk, the pace I achieve. My body and its walking is how I explore and navigate that world. I walk a (my) human scale, and this is the scale at which I am in the world and sets the rate at which I move through it. It is the scale that I have evolved to and sits alongside the evolved scale of the non-mechanical dimensions of the world I inhabit.

 

I walk at a pace that reflects my body. As I progress through replicated walks my pace slows as I tire; at the end of island circumnavigations, I stumble, my legs begin to hurt. I move slower or faster—slower as I pick my way along the edge of a ploughed field, stepping and balancing over cloying, turned earth, and faster as I stride over firm sand, washed smooth at the sea’s edge; slower, and breathing harder, as I move up the hill of the long wall of Alnay, and faster as I am blown and pushed in the unseen moving air as I walk downwind on Fair Isle.

 

I walk at a pace that allows me to hear, to see, to notice—to notice the moments that populate my haiku. I look for what I can hear; omni-directional hearing triggering focussed looking/seeing (Carpenter and McLuhan, 1960, p. 68). I turn towards the windblown calls of a skein of Pink-footed Geese; I hear them before I make out the undulating broken line of birds flying into the wind. The wind sighs through hawthorn hedges, sings in overhead cables, or roars up the edges of cliffs; I listen to mechanical drones and the clanks of machinery.1 In this way I understand where I am. As I hear in the air, I also feel the unseen moving air. It pushes me over as I walk and trip on Fair Isle, it carries the call of the curlew across a fellside as I walk the track of an unseen mine tunnel beneath my feet. It sounds past me as I walk round the north point of Papa Westray, and it carries the rain and snow I feel hitting me as I walk Contención Island. Evelyn Glennie suggests that hearing and touch work in concert and that, on occasion, they may be combined arguing that ‘(h)earing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals which are then interpreted by the brain … touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both’ (Glennie, 2017). A similar point about feeling sound is made by Salome Voegelin when discussing being in the presence of the (dangerously) loud music of Otomo Yoshihide. She describes ‘(t)he engrossed physicality of his performance renders listening an equally physical practice’ (Voegelin, 2010, pp. 48-51). Less dramatic than either example, my walking is an enactment of Ingold’s assertion of haptic engagement with the atmosphere (2011, pp. 126-135). From how I think about walking, I move on to consider embodiment, walking and thinking, walking and solitude, and walking art and artists.

2.1.1 Walking in the lived body: From Kant via Husserl to Merleau-Ponty

 

Out of an eons-long history of emergent bipedalism still, for most people most of the time, walking is the simple, unconsidered, utilitarian locomotive act of getting from one place to another. Developments (riding animals and then various mechanical devices) allowed people to move themselves and their goods over land with increasing speed. Until the 20th century these means of transport still maintained contact with the earth (albeit earth coated with tarmac), but this changed in December 1903 as the Wright brother’s first flight opened the possibility of air travel. In the time it takes to walk 20 miles it is now possible to achieve new heights of speed and distance, to fly thousands of miles, to cross oceans, to move between continents ... and to experience the utter bodily bewilderment of jetlag. Through these mechanical advances is a sense of travel at a human scale lost, and given that many of these facilitated translocations are short-term—days to weeks—we remain permanent visitors, never properly in or of a place, tourists for whom the potential link to knowing where they are is irrevocably lost.

 

Walking, our slowest means of transport, has for some (myself included) an important hold on our psyche. Walking is ‘how the body measures itself against the earth’ (Solnit, 2002, p. 31); it allows ‘the sense of place that can only be gained on foot’ (Solnit, 2002, p. 9) as ‘each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience—so unlike the way air travel chops up time and space and even cars and trains do’ (Solnit, 2002, p. xv). Such a position embraces a phenomenological view, to which I subscribe. Our bodies are our way of having a world and bodily movement is what produces place; my experience and my walking is embodied.

 

In The Fate of Place Casey draws together a number of threads of philosophical thought that place the lived body, and its movement through walking, at the centre of our ability to experience the world (Casey, 1998, pp. 202-242). Kant argued that a body was necessary to experience a place and that, in the emplacement of things relative to each other, our body’s sidedness was fundamental. Perception has regions of up/down, back/front and left/right but such regions do not mean anything unless they are related to something fundamentally inherent in our experience—our own bodily state—and both our bodies bilaterality and the fact that this is not identical (our left and right sides are mirror images) is how we understand our placement. However, Kant did not say where we were in relation to the world.

 

Husserl takes these ideas and declares the body to be the centre of the entire perceptual field that pivots around it. Casey interprets Husserl in this way—‘A kinaesthetic sensation acts to “motivate” a particular perception in that if I move my body in a certain way, then things will appear differently—including the places in which they appear. Put more directly, the way I feel my own body being/moving in a place will have a great deal to do with the way that I experience that place itself’ (Casey, 1998, p. 219). This led to Husserl’s idea of the near sphere, the immediately proximate space around me which I can perceive, with which I can interact, and into which I can move.2 There is also a far sphere to which I do not have immediate access. An important distinguishing feature of the idea of the near sphere is that it is made up of real, experienceable, tangible things and is not the product of intuition. To illustrate the phenomena of the near and far field Husserl uses the example of walking. The near and far fields are not static but merge in and out of each other in a sensate whole as I move and, to move, I must first organize myself as a sensate body—I move my leg, I turn my head. Thus, my near and far spheres, my experience of the world, is my perception of a field unified by my movements, my kinaesthetic sensations, as I walk through it. Casey writes ‘… organic self-unification is the condition of the unification of the surrounding world. … First there is a “constitutive interconnection” between my already flowing bodily kinaesthesias and the appearances of “things given as close and distant.” The appearances of things initially distant alter as they come into my near-sphere, but I know this alteration with my body. … Second there is the orientation effected by the moving body: here the model is decisively radial. For my body remains a centre of orientation, even when I am walking’ (Casey, 1998, p. 225). This line of thought was reflected by Merleau-Ponty as ‘Our bodily experience of movement ... provides us with a way of access to the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p. 162). Thus, my body is my means of knowing the world.

2.1.2 All walking bodies are not equal

 

When I use the term embodiment, I recognise that this can be understood in a general sense, as a general human phenomenon - but for all that walking is a human activity experienced in common, it is not experienced equally - there will be as many experiences of embodiment as there are bodies - and these experiences and bodies will all differ. Writing about walking art and disability Rose argues that for many aspects of both walking and walking art the archetype is ‘not just male ... (h)e is able bodied, wealthy, heteronormative, urbane and white’ (Rose, 2020, p. 228). I write from a position of considering my own embodiment - the specific and subjective embodiment of an able bodied, cis, male, caucasian, sexagenarian – though it is the case that walking is shaped by (a range of) inequalities in many ways.

 

Up until the 20th century walking, as opposed to ‘taking a walk’, was such a routine act that it was scarcely noteworthy. Yet who walks, why they walk and where they walk is, and always has been, shaped in socially and politically determined ways. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 said ‘every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence and not giving a good account of himself or herself … shall be deemed a rogue and vagabond’ (Vincent, 2020). The poor walked from necessity, yet to be found walking the land and poor risked arrest and imprisonment. That this is not merely a reflection of history is reflected by Kawash’s description of people in the United States of America (USA) who have no home - ‘forced into constant motion not because they are going somewhere, but because they have nowhere to go ... simultaneously being nowhere ... not only being without home, but more generally without place’ (Kawash, 1998, p. 327). Whilst the causes of homelessness are many and varied, the walking of the homeless is a manifestation of placelessness.

 

For those with sufficient means, walking was a choice; they had the option of walking or riding and increasingly walking for recreation. Recreational walking occurred initially within the gardens of country estates and by the 20th century this was extending to more general rural walking and also extended from the wealthy, who had no need to work, to those who worked six days a week and looked to a Sunday walk for recreation. The possibility of such walking (for much of the population, who lived in towns and cities) was, paradoxically, shaped by mechanical transport. As the railways extended so rural walking increased. The railways provided a ready means to access both start and end points on rural walks. An accompanying increase in maps and walking guides meant that a walker could find their way unaided with no need to use a guide or to seek direction from those that they passed on the way (Vincent, 2020).

 

Like many other areas of life, walking was, and is, strongly gendered and if walking was precarious for those with little or no income, it was also precarious for women. Focusing for the moment on European culture, other than for domestic chores, recreational walking and unaccompanied walking was not expected of women (Andrews, 2020; Vincent, 2020). In English cities in the nineteenth century a lone woman walking out of doors risked accusation of prostitution; a risk enshrined in the name street-walker. A way to mitigate this risk was to walk accompanied by men or other women. In her history of ten women walkers Andrews (2020) chronicles these exceptions to such a general social rule; unusual women prepared to kick against the traces of their day such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf and the poet Nan Shepherd. Part socio-cultural examination, part biography, Lauren Elkin’s book Flâneuse examines the lot of the walking woman. Exasperated with ‘The great writers of the city, the great psychogeographers, the ones you read about in the Observer on weekends; they are all men and at any given moment you’ll find them writing about each other’s work, creating a reified canon of masculine writer-walkers. As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane’ (Elkin, 2016, p. 19), Elkin is a habitual urban walker and uses her walking as a way to know where she is. She works with the biographies of four women - Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand and Agnès Varda - and uses their (walking) biographies to contextualise her own urban walking that is also a sense making of her own biography across Paris, London and Tokyo.

 

Sharrocks and Qualmann’s art project Walking Women directly addressed the concern that walking was seen as a male preserve. Bringing together over 50 female artists, through a series of events at Somerset House in London over one week in 2016, the project identified, celebrated, and showcased the work of women who used walking in their creative practice (2017). In a project that similarly addressed the perceived ‘maleness’ of walking art, The S Project sought to reject the heroic, the male and the privileged (Butler and Filipska, 2020). Recognising the impracticality of the heroic long distance lone walking for anyone with domestic responsibilities, the two female artists, based on different continents, logged their daily steps as they went about their daily domestic lives then, using computer technology, they mobilized avatars along a long-distance route between north America and Europe.

 

But it is depressing to need to reflect that precarity for women walking is not confined to history; in the UK the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 (Dodd and Siddique, 2021) brought back to prominence women’s fears of walking alone, particularly at night (Obordo and Otte, 2021); this is an enduring and international phenomenon (Dip and Peters, 2021). Lydia Kennaway’s A History of Walking is a pamphlet of 16 poems about walking (Kennaway, 2019). Of particular note is her Advice to Women Walking After Dark a poetic reflection of the reality of the solitary female walker; the fact of it being written is an accurate and sad inditement of our current social state.

 

The experience of walking is shaped by race. Garnette Cadogan describes the experience of walking in his native Jamaica and in the southern United States of America (USA) (Cadogan, 2016). From Jamaica, being one amongst many, aware of where and how to walk, he was startled to realise that in New Orleans, as a lone Jamaican habitually on foot, he was seen as a threat. When walking in the USA he was the subject of police attention and assault by white men based on the assumption that by virtue of his colour and his actions he must be a criminal. In Britain those from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups are less likely to live near green urban spaces, less likely to live in rural settings and in rural settings may be subject to racism (Taylor, 2020). It is therefore hardly surprising that African Caribbean men have been less likely to walk, and subject to health problems in part as a consequence; their efforts to address this through rural walking are regarded as unusual (Minamore, 2018; Testament, 2018). Based in a former mining area in northern France, Sarah Harper organized a community walk aimed at celebrating the area’s former and current heritage. Successfully engaging local groups, over 450 people participated but Harper was interested in those who had chosen not to or who were unable to engage with the project (Harper, 2020). In photographs of the walk she could only find two people of colour. The reasons that groups of north African descent and Muslim women reported for not engaging with the project appeared to be linguistic, economic and religious (the walk took place during Ramadan). This also applies to soundwalking (discussed further below) flagged by Smolicki’s assertion that ‘no soundwalk is innocent’ (Smolicki, 2023, p. 7); in the anthology Smolicki edited, Chude-Sokei describes his experience of walking, sound, race and gender and how these are subject to racial and social stratification (Chude-Sokei, 2023).

 

Those with disability experience walking in different ways to those who are able-bodied (Rose, 2020). Walking artists, including Rose herself, look to challenge her archetype that I quoted earlier. Rose has suggested that any walking art project should state its accessibility aspects - not to necessarily cater for all, but to be explicit about what they are, so people can make informed decisions. Alec Finlay’s Creative Walking; Paths For All collaboration documented in his Day of Access blog works to increase, and promote access to, walking, aiming at populations that wouldn’t necessarily walk for exercise or their health (Finlay, 2019 to date).

2.1.3 Walking and thinking

 

Embodiment, movement, and walking doesn’t stop with the body but intimately involves the psyche, our mental and emotional life, both conscious and unconscious. Robert MacFarlane offers examples of cultures within which walking and thinking are synonymous both in a linguistic and a cultural sense offering, amongst other examples, the Thcho people of Canada for whom the terms for knowledge and for footprint can be used interchangeably (Macfarlane, 2012, pp. 27-31). He also highlights that whilst the path trodden always goes forward in time, the path thought can go both forwards and back in time offering a route into memory, a link between footfall, knowledge and memory as exemplified in Australia’s First Nations Peoples' dreaming tracks. But lest this seems like some comfortable psychic inevitability, he cautions that the connection of walking and thinking is neither automatic nor universal pointing out ‘if you’ve ever walked long distances for day after day, fatigue on the path can annihilate all but the most basic brain functions’. Thomas Clark offers what could be considered the mind’s emotional counter to this. In In Praise of Walking (Clark, 1988) he offers his poet’s view of the truths and joys of walking such as ‘Walking is the human way of getting about’, ‘Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant’; his pamphlet concludes with his paean ‘Is there anything that is better than to be out, walking, in the clear air?’

 

Clearly, what goes on inside our heads is closely linked to the act of walking. Solnit suggests that ‘While walking, the body and mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical rhythmic act …’. Developing the idea of a link between walking and thinking, Robinson (2013) elaborated three ways in which this could manifest itself. Firstly, walking allows the development of a pantheistic state of mind in which all things are equal and heightened powers of awareness bring knowledge and pleasure; secondly, whilst undertaking the mundane activity of walking the mind is given license to flourish; thirdly, walking is a process of giving license to think imaginatively about one’s place in the world.

 

‘Walking to think’ was a recognised activity for philosophers and poets. For Nietzsche (Gros, 2014, pp. 11-29), Rousseau (Solnit, 2002, p. 19) and Kierkegaard (Solnit, 2002, p. 24) solitary walking was an important means of generating intellectual space and processing their thoughts. William Wordsworth, discussed by Solnit (2002), and juxtaposed with Bashō (of whom more later) by Collier (2014), was a prodigious walker with a history of covering large distances on foot, for example across France in the time of the French Revolution. Wordsworth was a poet for whom walking was so important that to not walk would have meant to not write (presaging Hamish Fulton’s adage ‘no walk, no work’) (Solnit, 2002, pp. 104-117; Strachan, 2017). For Wordsworth walking seems to have been the way to think; he needed to be in motion to think, in order to write. Outside, on the Lakeland fells, or back and forth within his study, the action and rhythm of walking was the genesis of his poetry.3 Indeed, he spent so much time walking the lands around his home that he was able to write a comprehensive travel guide to the Lake District (Wordsworth, 1835).

 

A contemporary reflection of this relationship between walking and thinking is found in Nancy Gaffield’s poem Meridian, based upon her experiences during a solo walk north along the Greenwich Meridian as it passes through England from Peacehaven on the south coast to Sand le Mere on the east coast just north of the Humber estuary (Gaffield, 2019). This is a work that is ‘about time, walking and lines: lines, both real and imaginary, in all their forms. It is also a walking practice, walking in the Wordsworthian sense of “a mode not of travelling, but of being”—a process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms.’ (Lewis, 2016). Gaffield herself invokes John Clare as ‘her constant companion’ and talks of ‘following Clare up the Great North Road’ as she walked the section of the meridian that runs north from Epping Forest, referencing Clare’s walk home after absconding from the asylum at High Beech.4 Prior to his mental illness and commitment to High Beech, for John Clare the urge to walk was irresistible, drawing him away from Sunday churchgoing—‘I got a bad name among the weekly church goers forsaking the “church going bell” and seeking the religion of the fields tho I did it for no dislike to church for I felt uncomfortable very often but my heart burned over the pleasures of solitude & the restless revels of rhyme [sic]’ (Vincent, 2020, p. 39). Such solitude is a dimension of my practice.

 

 

2.1.4 Walking and solitude

 

Historically, walking could, for many people, be their only way of achieving solitude, their way of escaping crowded domestic interiors (Vincent, 2020); today a group of people walking together is, in large part, about seeking social interaction—the fellowship of being together. I hold with Knafo’s thought of solitude as ‘the physical and psychological withdrawal from others, a condition of being alone with oneself, either by choice or by virtue of an undesired circumstance. Radical or primary solitude, the condition of being alone in one’s experience, is the basic state of human existence.’ (Knafo, 2012, p. 55). However, I see this as more a psychological than a physical withdrawal, as it is possible to be alone with oneself in the proximity of others.

 

Considering solitude and artistic creativity (in general, not specifically relating to walking) Knafo argues that, as with many other creative acts that require a degree of concentration and immersion, many artists seek solitude to work (Knafo, 2012). What sets such artists apart from non-artists is that for non-artists the process of creation is likely to bring them into repeated contact with others for the process collaboration, verification or validation; artists, she argues, habitually and repeatedly, create alone until the finished work is ready for exposure in the world—‘they withdraw from the general course of life, returning to aloneness for the purpose of creating a product that speaks in a new way to others about existence.’ (Knafo, 2012, p. 57). This is also reflected by walking artist Craig Mod. In a blog post he explained why, when contacted by people who asked to join him on his long walks, he routinely declined; for him walking in company inevitably produced a combination of dissipation of emotional energy and distraction from his artistic focus (Mod, 2021).

 

In general, my walking is a solitary act. I have gradually come to realise why solitary walking is important for me and why it is my default method of creating work. As suggested by Knafo and Mod, solitary walking is, for me, about working; about what I am doing, how I am doing it, where I am, what is happening around (and within) me. While I walk, I am in a shifting state—often concentration, sometime reverie. I look to where I am, what is happening, what I am feeling both physically and psychologically as I move. I am constantly looking, listening ... thinking ... composing (I get snatches of text/poetic phrases that come to mind as I walk). Add to this the fact that I am by nature an introvert; whilst I can easily deal with the social interaction that goes along with walking as a member of a social group it nonetheless constitutes both a distraction from a creative focus and ‘emotional work’. Always to some degree wearing and tiring, it is something that I recognise the need to step away from to recover, to recharge. But crucially, such emotional work is conducted to the exclusion of ‘walking work’, of creating. Most of the works in Chapters 3 to 5 I created whilst alone.5

 

2.1.5 Walking Art

Co-curating Walk On a 2013 exhibition on walking art, Morrison-Bell observed that artists ‘walk’ in a multitude of ways:

Some trace their daily movements, sometimes aided by GPS devices, and others narrate, record, follow, photograph, make, paint, draw, drift, walk, guided by the wind or navigating in the dark; all devising extraordinary ways to record, annotate and translate their walks into art objects or experiences (Morrison-Bell, 2013, p. 1).

Although not proposed as such, this offers a simple definition of walking art as ‘walking and its translation into art objects or experiences’. The simplicity of such a definition is inclusive of the wide range of activities that are included within the broad church of walking art.

 

Whilst the walker and art is a feature of modernity, the flâneur in Baudelaire’s 1860’s essay The Painter of Modern Life (Baudelaire, 1995) is a walker but is neither an artist nor creating art. However, the flâneur’s behaviour, his drifting, strolling, meandering walking were taken up by Situationist International in general, and Guy DeBord in particular, as he and his compatriots embarked on their 1950’s dérives—aimless urban drifts on foot that sought to make cultural production a part of everyday life. Moving on five to ten years and the late 1960’s saw the start of the careers of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton (both destined to become prominent walking artists, of which, more below) and from this point forward there has been an increasing number of artists making artworks by walking.6 Amongst the lineage of walking artists, there are two whose work I have returned to again and again, Hamish Fulton and Richard Long.7 Two of the earliest (and still current) solitary walking artists whose work I return to in thinking about things that influence my walking practice—solitariness, ideas driven walking, respect for nature and the use of (concise) text as a means of presenting work.

 

Hamish Fulton

Hamish Fulton defines himself as a walking artist; ‘I call myself a “walking artist”, and reject all art history that says my art is a category of Land Art (outdoor sculpture)’ (2010, p. 9). Fulton’s earliest walking work, London, 2 February, 1967 (1967), is a photograph of a group of students with overlaid text describing the walk; all of his subsequent work is generated by and relates solely to walking as summarised in his statement ‘no walk, no work’. Although he produced the work in February 1967 he recounts that ‘it would take me a further six years to gradually establish through trial and error a working practice … TO MAKE 100% ART RESULTING FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF INDIVIDUAL WALKS’ (Collier and Morrison-Bell, 2013, pp. 61-65). The emphasis on the walk seems central and is linked with ecological concerns which Fulton sees his art as addressing—‘Our rejection of nature is the cause of global warming—Walking (and especially including wild camping) allows us the opportunity to be influenced by nature and gain an attitude of respect for all life forms not just human life’. The centrality of this element of his work is also identified by commentators. ‘Apart from the merit of individual pieces, Fulton's work raises questions about our relation to nature and about the role of art in shaping as well as expressing this relationship’ (Haldane, 1998). Fulton also sees a spiritual dimension in his work, but although commentators suggest his walking is meditative (Bevan, 1990) he differs, regarding his wild camping as having spells of being meditative but his walking as requiring a combination of contemplation and being attentive and careful, offering the example of a series of seven-day walks in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland and the need to constantly be aware of the weather and its implications (Fulton, 2005). Fulton’s walks, usually solitary, are often extended in several ways. He walks over consecutive days within a defined location on single occasions (21 days in the Beartooth Mountains, Montana) or on repeated occasions (15 walks of seven days in the Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland over a period of 19 years). He walks consecutive days to cover large distances (2838 km. from Bilbao to Rotterdam (2002)(Fulton, 2010)) and he also walks at very high altitudes.

He uses text, photographs, wall drawings and, latterly, three-dimensional wall-mounted works as his summations of his walks. His text is spare and short, often purely factual in relation to things like time, location and features encountered. The text often accompanies photographs which ‘… cannot convey the dimensions of a walk, but they do act as visual triggers, conjuring the conditions of that walk for our imagination and transporting us to Fulton's working place’ (Haldane, 1998). However, despite their sparseness his works manage to be hugely evocative. Haldane suggests that ‘For all their apparent matter-of-factness, Fulton's texts are not reports of a world existing apart from us but poetic expressions of distinctly human interests’ while Bevan argues ‘Apparently as severely pruned as ever art can be, that column of words managed, nevertheless, to evoke a rich and mysterious experience of nature’ (Bevan, 1990; Haldane, 1998). The brevity of Fulton’s displayed works, although generated from the artists’ specific walks, allows his audience to travel in their own imagination with and beyond the single work.

 

Richard Long

Richard Long describes himself as an artist who is interested in ideas with his walks as the enacted consequence of the idea and representing ‘a direct, immediate and practical way of interacting with nature’ (Moorhouse, 2002, p. 36). In the summer of 1967 he produced one of his earliest (and an iconic) walking work, A Line Made by Walking (1967). The work is a relatively short straight line, perhaps 25 yards, marked on grass by repeated walking over a 20-minute period. It would have disappeared within hours and now exists only as a black and white photograph. Long makes exclusive use of natural materials, ‘stone, water, mud, days, nights, rivers, sunrises’ (Long, 2007c) and he denies that he is any sort of ‘romantic’ artist. The objectiveness of his use of brief, matter-of-fact text goes some way to achieving this. He sees his works in the landscape as minimal interventions, ‘almost nothing, it’s just about being here—anywhere—being a witness from the point of view of an artist’, and his presence in the landscape almost undetectable (Long, 2007a).

 

There are four linked dimensions to Long’s work: the walks, the sculptures he creates whilst walking, the subsequent documentation of both of these, and the works he creates solely within galleries. The walks and the works he creates whilst walking are viewed as his primary art works, but he distinguishes between the walks and the landscape sculptures. The sculptures made in the landscape ‘belong to a restricted vocabulary of elemental shapes: lines, circles, spirals, crosses and ellipses’ (Moorhouse, 2002, p. 37) but their meaning goes beyond their shape. Moorhouse argues that they ‘provide evidence of the artist’s presence in a particular place’ and are thus ‘an index—a trace—of the relation between man and nature’ (Moorhouse, 2002, p. 38). The landscape sculptures are instinctive responses to specific settings that Long encounters on a walk—‘usually, the landscape works are the result of walking through a landscape on a walk. So, it’s like seeing the world from the point of view of walking through it. In one sense the sculptures are sort of stopping places along walking journeys’ (Moorhouse, 2002, p. 65). The gallery sculptures share similarities (materials, shape) with the sculptures placed in the landscape, but the impact of their presence as physical objects is, Long argues, different. With their immediacy and presence, the gallery sculptures also offer a viewer the opportunity to imagine their creation and their relationship to nature. The subsequent documentation of his work is usually prepared in three ways—‘in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience.’ (Long, 2007d) Whatever means he uses, Long’s intent seems to be to provide ‘sufficient information for the viewers to imagine the circumstances that lead to their creation’ (Moorhouse, 2002, p. 38).

 

Fulton and Long share much in common; their use of walking as a generative act, and their use of photographs and brief, distilled, text to present works. They both describe a respect for nature though my sense is that this is more prominent for Fulton; it features less in what Long says about his work and he has, on occasion stated that he is not an environmental artist. However, there are also differences between these two walking artists. While both use photographs the focus of the image varies between the two artists. Fulton’s images are most often of a view of the place he has been walking (and they are often overlaid with some documentary text such as date and location, though this is always very brief, whilst Long’s, though incorporating similar text elements, tend to focus on the sculptures he makes in the places that he walks. Long’s sculptures, both in the landscape and the gallery, are a point of separation between the two artists, though both see their works as being ephemeral, moving lightly across the land, being almost nothing.

 

Long’s use of the phrase ‘almost nothing’ invites thoughts of Luc Ferrari and his sound work ‘Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer’ an avant garde, acousmatic sound work that presents the early morning sounds of the small Dalmatian Coast fishing village of Vela Luka on the island of Korcula (Ferrari, 1967-70; Caix and Ferrari, 2013). It is not possible to know whether Long was conscious of the work and its title—he used the phrase in 2007 and Ferrari first released the work in 1967, so it is at least chronologically possible. Whilst the ordinariness of the subject matter brings to mind thoughts of John Cage, for Ferrari ‘an “almost nothing” is a homogenous and natural, non-urban place imbued with specific acoustic qualities (transparency and depth)’ (Caix and Ferrari, 2013, pp. 154-155).8 It therefore seems to be a meld of an ordinary place and its acoustic properties, and Long shares this use of the term as he reflects on being in any place and being a witness as an artist, just having a view of what is.9

On to 2.2 Sound 


Back to Table of Contents