Chapter 6. In conclusion
In this thesis I have posed three research questions, grounded in my practice and have then set about answering them through my practice.1 In Chapter 2 I presented a literature review that offers a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 I describe and discuss my research process of making and analysing, moving between ‘making sensation’ (creating art works) and ‘making sense’ (analysing, reflecting and giving meaning).
In Chapter 3 I presented and discussed three works that together explored how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. I examined my embodiment through my acts of walking, how I move in the world, and this allowed an examination of the role of my senses in guiding my progress through the world, illuminating my embodied, multi-sensate nature through examining what it means to blunt, overwhelm, or even functionally remove, some of my senses. These works also suggested that my movement, human movement, can be marked on the earth on which we walk, that movement is shaped by the air through which we move, the topography of the surfaces on which we move, and that movement and its associated organisation of sensory perceptions, can shape the nature of time. In Chapter 4 I developed what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. I began these walks in order to consider time, looking to re-configure time. However, whilst doing this, 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 described 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 enactment of my final work presented in this thesis, an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking.
Chapters 3 to 5 also document a process of sense making and analysis. This process of sense making and analysing was not linear but was built of sequential cycles of varying duration and each containing a varying number of works. It was possible for the same piece of work to be involved in more than one cycle and to be involved in different cycles for differing aesthetic reasons. The sequence in which I made my works does not match the sequence that emerged from my sense making. So, the sequencing of the works as set out in my written thesis is the result of my sense making analyses, an analytic critique of my practice and this critique grew, matured and consolidated over time as a consequence of my continuing practice. The products of this process of creating, analysing then creating again are the ‘findings’ of my research. They are expressed in symbolic data, as the material forms of my practice—sound and poetry. My writing in this thesis does not replace my findings but describes and discusses them in Chapters 3 to 5 and here offers my conclusions in Chapter 6.
6.1 Answering my research questions
My path of creating these works, set out across Chapters 3 to 5 is my answer to my research questions that I posed in Chapter 1. I have created three bodies of work that together explored my embodied act of walking—movement, time and distance in the landscape. My works come from a phenomenological view of myself as a sensate embodied walker, of place, tangible or intangible, and my embodied scale of movement within it. My works have been created through walking and I have recorded, translated, composed, and re-imagined my walking using sound recording and text (and image).
Within my works I am ever present, a sensate embodied walker (of over 750 miles), a complex set of rhythms, audible as I pace, step, stride, breath, cough and occasionally talk; I have made no attempt to hide myself and the fact that the sound recording contains a moving human being. My works blend sound and text (each to varying degrees) to offer a multi-faceted mediation of, and meditation on, movement through place across time. As a listener reads a printed text work inside the sounds of a sound piece they are reading while contained within the sounds of my walking, however closely or distantly they are hearing it. It is the context for their thinking and their interpretation of the text; their thinking and reading are shaped by the rhythm of my footfall, the sounds of the place that I am walking in, and reading and listening are synergistic. For the listener in my installations to read the text is to be offered a moment from within the walk, a small, fixed point in the moving sounds, calling up a moment or a place. Both text and sound come from the same creative experience and offer a cross-referencing synthesis, a new whole that re-imagines my walking in place.
I have made use of indeterminacy to choose sites in the landscape, to better reflect the world unfiltered by the lens of my personal preferences or prejudices—the world on its terms rather than mine. I have taken place from a geographical location, through place defined by biology or socio-culture, to place as an imagined island created by my embodiment and on my embodied scale. Through sound and text my works record, disassemble, translate, and re-present the cyclical rhythms of the world. Time, as a unique and personal phenomenon, conceptualized as experienced cyclical change, with memory and anticipation, is offered as recurring rhythms, diurnal and seasonal, re-imagined in multiple ways that offer the evocative opportunity to walk along with me, to remember a walk made or imagine a walk to come.
I have worked with a range of ‘sites of playing’. At an outdoor site the idea of audience largely translates into those who merely notice. In gallery installations my use of sound offers an environment within which a listener can make their own walk along the various and several paths between speakers. They re-build disassembled days, bridge seasons, join places. Through personal acts of listening, listeners walk their own imagined paths and my imagined islands. As they do so they read poetry that offers moments in time, small observations held within a larger whole, a way to metaphorically focus, glance or glimpse. In radio broadcasts the lack of visual accompaniments places the emphasis on listening and the heard; I compose in sequenced steps and my poetry becomes a spoken word performance.
I wrote haibun and mesostics, poetic forms from differing traditions, the poetics of 17th century Japan and the modernism of 20th century USA. I used the mesostic as my political shout from inside the narrative of a walk; the haibun offered symbolic resonance, small objective moments within a walk. In presentation they transcend their content as their physical arrangement on paper, as concertina-fold books and scrolls, invites the walk, reflects time and distance and the whole becomes a metonym. Scripta continua move close to Rebecca Solnit’s line as a journey as, stripped of punctuation and spacing, hiding content in plain sight, inviting reading and composition, the line of letters stretches away. Physically co-located within the same paper forms as the poetry, blended photo-images offer movement and a seamless, sometimes dream-like, trace across the work.
In these ways my two analytic tools (sound and text) and personal experience have reimagined movement, time and distance in the landscape. They have worked to investigate the relationships between my personal experience and movement in the landscape, and through these several configurations in location and exhibition have mediated my affective encounter with place.
6.2 Contributions to knowledge
Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge that sits across a number of fields, fields that have previously been more often distinct but that I bridge with the findings of my research—particularly the fields of ‘walking’ and ‘sound art’, but also the fields of ‘walking’ and ‘poetry’—my linkages of these fields mark paths that are not yet well trodden.
My specific contributions include:
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The use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place. Offering the opportunity to juggle time and place, replicated walking allows re-imagining for both artist and audience.
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Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it (a walk of words2), and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act.
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Walking Islands – whilst walking on sea-bound, remote islands is unusual, it is not novel. However, 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, is. This involves replicated walking to first build the island over time and second to then explore it or re-establish it.
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My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it (as described in Appendix C) overcoming the technical issues of equipment choice, battery powering and the challenge of making extended recordings of myself moving in moving air.
6.3 Future research
From out of my descriptions of the works in this thesis come my ideas for future research.
6.3.1 Replicated walks
I am interested in continuing to experiment with the idea of replicated walks, both over the time periods I have used (hours/days) but also over longer time periods (every month for a year or every summer solstice over years). This links to my planning to continue to work on islands (see below).
6.3.2 Developing a Pattern of Islands
Being totally ‘islanded’ I will, inevitably, continue to visit more or less remote islands of a certain size and experiment by walking on them. The next example will be Eday which I plan to visit in May of this year.
Over the time that I have been working on this thesis not all of the work I have recorded has been included. Having presented work from three real islands I will now turn to work on the recordings and texts of walks I have made on up to 15 other (mainly Hebridean) islands. Each can be presented in its own right but the collection of works from nearly 20 islands raises thoughts of creating sonic archipelagos and Island Suites, along with ideas of multi-site installations and durational radio works.
Having created two imaginary islands I am in the process of slowly creating a third. I plan to continue to work on Alnay, with ideas such as replicating the summer solstice walk on multiple occasions to offer replicates across years.
In my work with, and writing about, islands I have used chance procedures to make my way and simple field notes. There is scope to develop this by my considering the use of auto-ethnographic methods to guide and analyse my walking, and to shape my writing. This would need me to first spend some time researching the methods then experimenting with applying them.
6.3.3 Radio and re-composition
I have accumulated a sizeable back-catalogue of sound works and I plan to continue to experiment with how I (re-)compose works for radio. I will continue to develop my incorporation of spoken word into performed works and to research the impact of the incorporation or exclusion of such vocal works (given our human preference for causal and semantic listening).