Experiments with the edges of walking: a collective reconnaissance

The enquiry borrows the word ‘edge’ with all its meanings to ask how it might be applied to walking. Walking encompasses mundane, everyday walking and the deliberate act of going for a walk. It is an invitation to the reader to walk in familiar places with a different attention, with the emphasis on the experience of the walk as the location of the art. Against the back-drop of non-human agency, human to human distancing and expanded digital ubiquity, the artist grapples with re-imagining a participatory art practice.

The tight experimental framework serves as a container for the fluid and fragmented explorations that ensue. There is a step by step set of instructions that the artist has set for herself, a directory of walks that is ever evolving, and a walking log which holds remnants of walks, randomly selected. A mapping of the walking experiments onto definitions of ‘edge’ facilitates the emergence of live threads. The text is populated with imaginary walking conversations and emerging themes create a signpost of possibilities.

Sally Stenton

www.sallystenton.com

I will be pleased to supply a PDF of the thesis on request.

Key themes that I am carrying forward in my practice:

• Exploring how walking might facilitate a blurring of human edges.
• Pushing the possibilities of a participatory practice during times of human-to-human distancing and beyond.
• Experimenting with the merging of physical and digital modes of connection (human and beyond human).

Post MRes strands of work are summarised below. Please check the website or contact me for more information and opportunities to participate.

Walks Without Edges

Walking at the same time in different places. Walkers respond to the same simple poetic prompt and share responses that are fused together into a collage each week for a year.

A Walk in Common

A series of simultaneous walks, using the ‘Walkometer’ to generate random walk suggestions.

A Glass Envelope

International Online Artist Residency. In collaboration with Svetlana Atlavina. Nov 2020.

The Walking Post of the Imagination

Postcards sent from person to person to provoke walks with our non-human compatriots.

How to Live Together

Online workshops for humans and plant guests. In collaboration with Susie Olczak. Feb and March 2021.

And you sounds

Ongoing collaboration with Jo Miller converting distant walking into experimental writing that merges our walking experiences.

If mud made me

A collaboration with Kelcy Davenport, Shaima al_sitrawi, Nawrast Sabah Abd Alwahab and Sarah Strachan connecting Iraq and the UK through geology, walking and voice.