Group Show / WALK WITH ME
6pm Thursday 28 November to 5pm Sunday 22 December
Curated by Melinda Hunt
Exhibition Essay by Lisa Pang
Why Walk
Walk with me. It’s an invitation to move with me through space. The ‘me’ is the artist-as-researcher, but it’s also you, my guest, as you join in walking with me. You might be a walker participating in the project, or a spectator of the outcomes of my walk. The exhibition project Walk With Me at DRAW Space is not conceived around the primacy of drawing but of walking. Walking is an open-ended, revelatory and essentially curious activity. When we walk, we move between locations and while we might have a destination in mind, it’s an active process subject to all manner of chance, so we can’t predict exactly how it will go. What will be encountered, observed, remembered, found? Paul Klee may have famously quipped that in drawing a line he was taking a dot for a walk, but here, these artists are out walking in the world as a generative process for their dots (practices). Their creation and subsequent arrangement of dots and lines are photographs, objects, transcriptions, maps, and other visible marks, exhibited as an outcome of their walks. These outcomes are shown as drawings, however - and this is critical to their interpretation - they are drawn because of a deliberate inquiry by that artist-researcher and in that sense are somewhat incidental.
Curator and walking artist Melinda Hunt explains that the intent in selecting these 6 research projects was to gather artists for whom walking is an aid to research. Within each practice, drawing sits inside other research processes, and alongside other outcomes, not exclusively drawing. As such, the exhibition will be active; drawings, artefacts and a range of documentation made as a consequence of walking with me will be presented.
Walk With Me takes place in the context of lines walked in human and in art histories. People first walked as the only means of transport, expedition and mass migration. Pre-industrially and spiritually motivated, pilgrimages were pathways to salvation walked by many and which exist still. With the industrial age, artists
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walked out of studios and into plein air with the creation of tubed paint and portable materials, working directly from and within the landscape. Walking is easy – one foot in front of the other. It is ordinary and accessible to most. Most recently during the Covid epidemic and government-enforced circles of confinement, many of us took to walking our local areas. Walking is political and a visible tool for civic activism; just last week an orange-tinted sea of walkers walked our city streets, a wave of walking unrest at family violence.
Within the history of art, however, walking takes on a particular performative potency and additionally, is shared by some form of visual residue. Richard Long took the drawn line off the page in 1967, when he made A Line Made by Walking. Ana Mendieta delved further into bodily aspects by pouring a pool of blood on a city sidewalk and documenting the reactions of people walking by: People Looking at Blood Moffitt (1973). Hamish Fulton, a walking artist states that for him, 'no walk, no work’, as each walk, even little ones, are experienced only by Fulton but are documented by a variety of media. In The Lovers (1988) Marina Abramović and Ulaywalked at epic scale; 2,500 km each from either ends of the Great Wall of China, yet after years of bureaucracyinterrupted planning, their 90-day walk ended not in union but bitter misunderstanding and separation. In Jerusalem, walking with a leaking can of green paint, Francis Alÿs drew into existence a wobbly green paint line marking a redundant border in The Green Line (1995). One windy day in Sydney I took part in Tim Knowles’ collaborative drawing project, Mass Windwalk (2013) in which participants were drawing collaborators; we started at an art school and walked inner city streets guided by wind vanes attached to our helmeted heads. Our resultant directional lines were recorded, laid over the urban streetscape and converted into digital drawings. Within this continuum then the walking artists of Walk With Me situate themselves as sensate walkers, walking in specific places to specific purposes, attuned not only to their research but also to you, as you Walk With Me.
The arduous physicality of walking becomes palpable in the work of Mia Salsjö. A multi-disciplinary artist, Salsjö has created vastly complex musical scores from architectural plans and built architecture. While walking the Himalaya Hillary and Norgay Trail however Salsjö took a more singular approach, discovering an unexpected nostalgia for a pre-technical past. The sheer endurance of walking in extreme mountain conditions, over 80 km and 27 days at high altitude, produced a reductive focus. Observing the
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grinding away of her walking sticks, she has made wrapped poles as drawn artefacts of endurance; celebrating culture, walking as feat, and the conscious inward experience as stilled and silent object-drawings. This might seem antithetical yet in the coloured bands and resemblance to Buddhist ringing staffs, they are still evocative of sound. As Salsjö says, “all of my artmaking is a prelude to writing music, so this too is a score of sorts.”
Emotive qualities of spaces and places are the subject of Kiera
O’Toole’s field research; where she draws gesturally, in-situ, and fascinatingly, to prolong a lingering first impression. This experienced phenomenological character of a place is something we can all probably relate to but will find difficult to articulate. O’Toole emphasizes the pathic and embodied action of drawing as a process receptive to both place and drawer, even developing a vocabulary to attempt to verbalise this unutterable, through terms such as DiSp (drawing in space), spatialised feelings and felt maps For this exhibition, O’Toole’s gestural drawings are expanded to include a range of experimental documentation made over multiple stays in Taree and Wingham, in country NSW.
Another experientially based walking artist, Melinda Hunt selfdescribes as a ‘human seismograph’. Each walk takes place at a specific place and time, and while Hunt is attached to a drawing apparatus. There is no planned route, though she generally walks at night or early in the morning, moving along the quietened streets of Newtown with a drawing board and camera attached to her body, attuned to capture the multiplicity of weather, sights, sounds, steps, smells and textures encountered. For her, the sites of walking really are a discovery of a new town as places known from the past and only recently returned to. Walking and drawing at the same time, Hunt’s attention can’t be exclusively on the drawn surface (and she tries not to look) so the marks made are not a seen landscape so much as a psychological one – perceived, remembered, and then jostled, meandered and marked into being. The resulting Maps of Being series will be shown; 2-dimensional drawings and video. Walking-drawing devices attached to the body enable artists to record the kinetic motion of walking, introduce chance, and remove themselves from the posture of consciously drawing. Just last month multi-disciplinary artist Luca Idrobo was presenting his expansive Walking Abstractions project in Porto, all while continuing his research by drawing his daily walk from accommodation to venue. As Idrobo walked through the old town, climbing its steep roads and huffing up and down stairs he carried 2 drawing boxes; one tied to his abdomen and one in his backpack.
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Each cardboard box is rigged with a drawing tool – various pens suspended over a piece of paper – also varied by weight and type. The effort of walking, the length of the journey and the actions of the walking body in negotiating twists and turns, and other vicissitudes of the journeys are transferred to the drawings. Poetically titled ‘Love Letters to Walking Art and Science’, these drawings will be exhibited alongside other documentation. Linda Knight is a drawer of maps, utilising drawing and critical stitching as research processes to assemble her work, styled as inefficient mappings of colonial histories. Taking on the pre-internet motif of the census walker, her project Big Cities – The Citizen Census relies on the walks of collaborators to collect small data (set walks in which the artist requests detailed observation of little urban details; anything from spider activity to the location of plastic bags, graffiti and the presence of sunlight). Knight then works from these observation-directed walks of many to create a subversive (hence her term inefficient) mapping. The information gathered by these purposeful walks records usually unobserved ‘citizens’, enabling access to alternate histories and narratives, and ultimately, a counter census.
Mapping Edges is a collaboration between Alexandra Crosby and Ilaria Vanni. Together with Sarah Jane Jones they will be leading walkers in a Water Walk to explore, trace, and document wetland trajectories in Sydney Park. As a collective, their research data is refined in and presented in photo diagrams. This format is a drawn visual medium, a technique straddling photography, text, chart and scientific visualisation. Building on the water walk, by way of a Disobedient Wildlife walk, anthro-artist Holly O’Neill and birdwatching guide Jade Peace will also take walkers to visit the same Sydney Park site, searching out (and drawing) animal disruptors to the depicted ecological landscape. Crosby outlines the group’s research objective, “we are interested in how we might shift walking from an individual activity to – walking with – neighbourhood ecologies, urban waterways, archives, critters, plants, and most importantly, Country.”
As you will see as you Walk With Me, walking may be a simple activity, but there are many ways artists walk to extend and develop knowledge, including of drawing, as “Walking is a way of lubricating thinking.” Melinda Hunt
© Lisa Pang, November 2024
An non-profit, artist-run platform to make, see and experience contemporary drawing.