The day will soon be here...

Everybody gather your wits about you - and pick up your feet and go for a walk. Bring back anything and everything you find, take photos, write notes, plot the route on a map.

Bring it all to LCC on Tuesday 5th March and add it to the Walks Wall that will be in the Street Gallery by the ramp that leads to the Design Block.

Anything goes - from your walk to uni today, or a walk you took years ago - to a walk your parents took before you were even a glimmer of thought in their minds - from photocopies of pages from travel journals and books about journeys, to muddy walking boots nailed to the wall, to the lyrics of folk songs that pay homage to the road.

As long as they are items that could not have been acquired or made had the creator not gone for a walk.

Come Come Come

Come to my super afternoon and hear talks by these 4 interesting gentlemen followed by a panel discussion. Then contribute your own imagery and text to the wall exhibit. Scroll down to visit each of their web pages.

Tom Barnett

Justin Partyka

Nathaniel Severs

Guy Gormley

Prepping for the exhibit on 5th March

Walking and Language

The first line of this song is "Savannah scatters and the seabird sings".But the intonation of his voice makes it sound different.
This is an example of how walking can reveal things about the natural world in a different way than language can, perhaps in a better way.
Language is a fixed manmade system with it's own rules... it is absolute. This is inappropriate when relating matters of the planet because the planet is entirely relative. Language's ability to communicate is based on the meaning of words. 

In this songline we hear the tone and intonation of the words before we deduce a meaning from them... 
by noticing this we are experiencing how things other than language itself can communicate or describe  something. 
Just as the way this line is creating an atmosphere in it's tonal and textural structure, Walking can describe planetary situations in more truthfully and in more dimensions than language can, because of it's ability to make our bodies and minds aware of materiality, texture, pace, mood etc.

How to fall asleep

Sometimes when you go to a gig and you realise you've zoned out and you're barely listening to the band anymore, just staring at them and thinking about something completely different. That's what this video is like. It's a random video I found on Youtube of 8 minutes of one rolling shot following a logging road near Ontario. The surroundings and the atmosphere are nice but because it's following the track you know what's going to happen and it's such a familiar motion that you assume everything that's going to happen next. Your perceptions are protected not challenged.

The imagery shows you appreciably beautiful scenery, and the continuity and duration of the shot is perfect for emphasising real-time pace that modern technologically enhanced life forgets. But it's also perfect for accommodating presumptions - you know what's coming. That's exactly the opposite of what walking can actually do for you - if you consciously submit yourself to walking IN nature rather walking ALONG channels made by man, you can discover new angles and features.

Of course walking along paths is equally important because human presence in nature is often helpful as well as undeniable, and walking the paths of other people and other times to and from other places and other people is one of the simplest pleasures, and a good way to humble oneself and disperse egotism - a good attitude to adopt in relation to living with a care of nature. But endless path-following is not a good film editing style if i'm trying to introduce walking as more than a simple transport mode.

sequencing style and seemingly random subject matter is ... a walk

Neither this video nor this song intentionally have anything to do with walking, environment, or perception that I am aware of, but the way the video is shot and the subject matter is a style I use and really like because it seems natural and not particularly edited - it feels more like an instinctive succession of sequential remembering of observations, which is how walking takes us back to our own pasts and from that and beyond to other peoples' pasts. With each footstep comes a new thought and as more ground is covered more thoughts are.. one leading to the next, rationally or not.

It is a narrative that doesn't make sense of something but creates a feeling of elegiac attachment to a place... the way we stroll around town or through fields along the same routes day after day, and no matter how long we leave it before we come back, just stepping foot in the same place brings back vivid observations of the past; of things we saw on the path and of things that were unrelated to the path but happening elsewhere those times we used to walk the path.

A walk into scary Merrell's Wood

testing territorialness and comfort zones

Bill Fay likes trees

Trees and sheep 

St Leonard's Forest film projected :)

The many screens shift your focus, emphasising the amount and variation of senses and scenes to attune to while walking. The projection into the wooded wall showed the natural growth of wood in the life of a tree, and the manmade appropriation of it.

Pilgrim

A short film about an age old pilgrimage in Ireland up Croagh Patrick on the last sunday of July

Silence

Silence is a film by Irish director Pat Collins made about his journey from Berlin to his hometown of Donegal. It's focus is the sound of a place, and folklore and community plays an important part in that.

A huge problem with environmental awareness efforts is that they often patronise humans in a polar response to the way we patronise nature and act as though we own it. Yes, we need to learn that we don't own the planet, but to be told we are parasites on this earth only incites apathy. 

Nature and humankind can live symbiotically and both reap huge rewards, both physical and spiritual  health. So to educate and emphasise the pleasure of individual and collective attachment to place, and the customs that come about from this, can incite a huge protective instinct in us for our earth.

Swandown

"Swandown is a travelogue and odyssey. A poetic film-diary about landscape and culture. It is also an endurance test and pedal-marathon."

"The work might be seen as both a heritage project and a living art project. Participants would be encouraged to share their memories, knowledge, life experiences, cultures and traditions for audiences both young and old."

Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair pedalled a swan pedalo from Hastings to the Olympic Park. 

I think I keep putting films on here because their narrative mirrors that of walking; sequential and consequential. This film is pretty funny too.

Aughty

Feature length documentary about life and land of Galway and County Clare in Ireland. Really want to see this.

by Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley

Two Years At Sea

Trailer for an amazing film of a true story about Jake who lives alone in Scotland, an existence he has craved all his life and spent two years working at sea in order to realise. This is the second film that Ben Rivers has made about Jake. 

It's sentiment for me is that you can gain so much from just slowing down and submitting yourself to being guided by life outdoors.

Inspired by a dance class I used the choreographic principles of the act of dance to make a traditional farm hurdle using hazel. The original skill was taught to Dom and I by an old farm worker we met near Abergavenny in Wales.

The piece represents the circumstantial tension that occurs when mankind comes into contact with the natural world.
The structural tension in the hurdle keeping the whole thing together is in perfect equilibrium.

The fact that the tension present in the natural world is reflected using processes and dynamics taught in choreography shows how similar human and natural dynamics are; if we continue to harm the world we will continue to harm ourselves, whether we think of it as direct or indirect harm. We must sync our minds and bodies to the planet's processes.

Systemic Equilibrium

Every ecosystem exists within a larger ecosystem susceptible to variable input and output, meaning fluctuating tension and fragile instability. 
Below are some sketches for sculptures and constructions to represent this

Below is the first construction I decided to make: This is a system of forces based around the shape of a triangle. A triangle is the strongest shape structurally and also represents the cyclicism of homeostatic natural ecosystems due to the fact that the continuation of a triangle past its internal space (the external angles) adds up to a circle (360 degrees)
The shape will collapse at any exertion of excess force upon it.

Walking is a metaphor for this: tread lightly and the world will keep it's shape

Made from recycled post-consumer wood and rope

My photos with some quotes about walking... includes the John Masefield poem. 

The second photo down isn't actually mine but I haven't found a suitable one yet.

And we cross each other's paths alive, as we trace the dances of the dead

3 videos I made at Hampstead Heath to experiment with showing how out paths cross just as out destinies and fates do. This idea came from a John Masefield poem but I can't remember which one, but it felt very appropriate because he Masefield lived in Ledbury in Herefordshire in the house next to Mama's bookshop. It's almost as I am crossing the path of his ghost dance as I walk the same walks and see the same views he did.

St Leonards Forest, West Sussex

A boxing day walk with my father and sister; the forest is near the town where both my mother and my father grew up. They both went there as children, my father every Sunday with his aunt and my grandma. The walk was a really nice way to imagine what my parents' childhood was like; walking can lead you back into the past and reveal histories and heritages, but as you walk on you become aware of the futures and legacies set by that past too.

There's a legend that a french vagabond named Leonard roamed the forest for years, but a dragon lived there too. After years he finally managed to slay the dragon but he was injured, and where his blood fell God made white lilies grow. This is the patch in the forest where Lilies of the Valley can be found. 

There is another legend that a local smuggler called Mick Mills was once visited by the devil who told him to give up his soul for his crimes. But Mick challenged the Devil to a race, and if he won he would get to keep his soul. Mick did indeed win and there is a mile long track through the forest known as Mick Mills Race.

Snoz finds a mushroom

Justin Partyka

Justin Partkya is a photographer. His work preserves the memory of the still present but disappearing traditional agrarian lifestyle still being held onto in parts of East Anglia. This is a film he made about 99 year old farmer Eric whose family have depended on and cultivated this land for over a century.

Dom and I met Justin by chance at an exhibition of his photographs we came across while cycling around Suffolk. We stayed the day at the farm and in the evening saw Justin speak about his work as he showed slides of it. Walking is a very important part of his practise.

Here is his website: http://justinpartyka.com/#/my-friend-eric---a-film and below a video of him explaining his work.

And below a quick slideshow of the slides I took on the walk that day, and of the farm that housed Justin's exhibition.

- Philly

Tide in - Time out

Two videos I made at Rhossili Beach on the Gower Peninsula in Wales last summer, noticing how the rhythm and pace of natural elemental processes is in time with our thought processes and slows our human pace down the that of the natural world.

- Philly

Landscape and the Human Heart

Observe your conscious experience of living in the natural time and space of our land.
Alter your pace and pressure to the pace and tension of nature. Do it by walking, wandering, strolling, travelling on foot.

Below is a 2012 Lecture given by Robert Macfarlane, author of 'The Old Ways' amongst other books about the land. 

- Philly