Pedestrian

Route: Plymouth Train Station to PCA Duration: 15 Mins Time of Day: Morning Socks: Feet in socks, socks as objects.  Shoes, looking at all the different shoes.  As transport. Different shoes influence different gaits. Weaponised cars:  Cars are brutal, always have been.  Lately cars have been weaponised.  Because it's so easy to kill someone with a car. Lines: Define spacial relationships. (Lygia Clark) It's easy to see this in a cityscape. Binary: Linear needs non-linear for definition, there is no binary in it.  Like the Foucalt liars theory, liars are just proving the existence of lies, or something like that?  And see also Lefebvre, he mixes up the binary too. Purpose: The space is that of commuters. Back in Totnes, earlier, around 8am ish, I saw a group of lads congregating at a terrace bar/cafe all hungover, laughing and recounting the night before.  They seemed incongruous to the frame work (pattern/system) the space had now become: transit channel to work/sc

Route: A circular walk around Totnes Duration: An hour and a half Time of day: Afternoon Seagulls: I tune into the cacophony of seagulls above.  I love their sound.  It brings me back to safety.  It's familiar.  It means home, whatever that is. Fishchowters'/Fishcheaters' Lane: Brilliant bit of walking related history - this green lane dates back to medieval times when fisher-people walked this way to the market as an alternative route to avoid paying taxes at the tollbooth.  I particularly like it because you don't often see other people.... Black Cat:    Another walking superstition.  The dog chases any luck away.  It's interesting that her fixation with the cat gives her such a strong purpose of direction, she deviates according to her desires or compulsions. Grass: She finds another purpose.  Eating grass growing in lines through the paving stones.  Although it's disconcerting when your dog eats grass I drift off, thinking it's poetic how thi

Route: Home to Totnes Train Station via the riverbank Duration: 20 Mins Time of Day: Morning Paul Ricoeur?:   ~reading the signs~ Projection/translation/ Production:    From nature to me not me to nature.  (Fulton talks about not imposing things on the site/nature.)  Fulton v Long.  In gallery, product v in situ/no product (see Tufnell and Wilson 2002) Thumb/Finger: Still using my finger memory system.  What would fingerprints as maps, enlarged, be like? All the lines/scars on the body as maps..... lines of memory, journeys... Polarised:  I'm working in two methods, pulling opposite ways.  Conceptual ideas made material are not expanding the research.  They're full stops on the end of a thought train.  Not process, just working to illustrate a point.  The more dynamic, unfolding processes seem to interweave theory/thought/discovery and are more like italics, gently accenting emphasis but totally integral to the meaning of the sentence. On the run

Route: Plymouth Train Station to PCA Duration: 15 Mins Time of Day: Morning Tarmac:  The crust of the earth made from tarmac.  I see under the skin where the roadworks have excavated.  The layers of stuff.... Strata.  Man made. Topography: This shape that hugs the surface.  The horizontality.  The way it changes as you near the spot you thought you could grasp in your vision.  How might the topography look as a drawn thing.  Topology, the mobius strip etc.... Plateau: A plateau is a safe resting place when climbing.  I'm plateauing now but it doesn't feel safe. All I can see is the next mountain face I have to navigate... Steps:  There are perfect steps (just near the station) where each one is at the right distance and height to take one step at a time, perfect.  Then there are the ones just in the university campus where I use two feet on one step meaning I have an uneven rhythm going up or down them.  It's hugely dissatisfying. The same foot is used to reach fo

Route:  Totnes to Dartington via Riverpath Duration: 1 hour 30 mins Time of Day: Midday Speeding Van: A van came speeding up the high street and I had started to cross.  Something snapped in me and I slowed right down, holding my ground and walking steadily across the road so the van had to slow down, I stared at the driver in the eyes and gestured he should slow down.  He gave me the finger and swerved round me accelerating loudly so I yelled and gave him the finger back.  I was furious.  He had come out of nowhere, speeding up a gentle road, full of pedestrians with hardly any room to walk on the pavement.  Wanker. From Ollie's sketchbook.. to the man in the van. Lucy Lippard: I try the Eskimo custom she describes in Overlay.  I'm walking the emotion out of my system along the path of the river. "The Eskimo is given a stick, the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with the stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage"....

Mary Overly The Six Viewpoints. I was introduced to this practice through Deborah Black during a workshop at In Other Tongues , a creative summit held at Dartington Hall 2017.   (see:  http://artdotearth.org/  ) I've been applying it to the walks.... THE SSTEMS Shape - Perceptual ability to see and feel physical form. Space - Perceptual ability to see and feel physical relationship. Time -  Perceptual ability to experience duration and systems created to regulate duration. Emotion -Perceptual ability to experience states of being. Movement - Perceptual ability to experience and identify with kinetic sensation. Story - Perceptual ability to see and understand logic systems as an arrangement of collected information. Difficult to document, of course........

Route: Blackpool to some outer rural village... Duration: 2 Days When I was 13 my best friend and I were planning what to do for the forthcoming half term break at school. Should we go nocturnal or go camping?  We were unsupervised, wild and fairly unhinged but we had the self awareness to know being nocturnal would be a shit idea. So we went camping. We got a bus somewhere - I'm not sure we actually knew where - got off and walked until we found a dingly dell fitting the preconceived notion of what an ideal camping pitch should look like (neither of us had experienced much camping before this...).  We had with us a small Action-Man play tent, borrowed from my friend's neighbour - who we nicknamed Mark Twain for some reason - about eight jumpers each and some tinned Alphabet Spaghetti.  Maybe we had blankets, but I have a memory of being constantly cold, so I doubt it. That night we were invaded by local boys who all smelled of ale and wouldn't leave us alone.  The w

Route: Plymouth Train Station to PCA via bank. Duration: 30 Mins Time of Day: Morning Leg Hurting:   Embodiment Metronome: Lefebvre Intersection: Pedestrian island Sonic Wind: Music from fancy dress shop suddenly cutting across my line like a sonic wind GoogleMap: used google map for an experience to make it to the bank...

Route: PCA to Plymouth Train Station Duration: 15 mins Time of Day: Dusk

Route: House to bus stop via two banks Duration: 10 Mins Time of day: Morning Surface: Topography of the streets, great images are being drawn in my mind of the skin of this landscape (townscape?). Lines:    The horizontal lines are interrupted by verticals.  I'm thinking of parallax and this makes me               imaging everything is illusion.  We may even be living in a synthesised invention and not                    know it. Detail:    I'm walking with a child who is seeing this route (a regular one for me but not for him) through untainted, fresh eyes.  He picks up every detail.  Observations of inanimate minutiae but also the movements of birds, people, vehicles all get mentioned.  The everyday. ........ Pace:  My companion walks very slowly.  It forces me to slow down.  This is agonisingly slow at first but I eventually enter a sedate pace. Burden: As usual I'm carrying a lot of baggage.  I begin to remember, at the age of my companion or roundabout,

Route: Interior of my house Duration: 2 Hours approx Time of Day: Morning Tracking my movements/walk around the house in the act of vacuuming. Removal:  Reversal of laying down lines and marks, lifting things away with the vacuum cleaner. Dust Motes:   Air is a mass.  The outblow of the vacuum blows the dust around and it illustrates the  movement of the air.  It's suddenly there.  Visible.  There's a poetry in having the invisible revealed to you. Traffic:  Carpet worn.  Foot traffic.  Imprint of the family. Interior Space:  Just noting the difference in being in the confines of walls compared to outside.  Vague reference Jung and houses being interior of minds.  Layout of subconscious etc Dolls House:  As I'm vacuuming I'm mapping the house in my mind.  I'm trying to use the memory palace method of remembering my prompts.  I get a huge memory afterwards when I sketch out the plan.  I remember playing at designing houses with a friend when I

Route: Home along Sharpham Path and back Duration: 45 Mins Time of Day: Morning Gateway: This is path is forged by feet.  It's a track that wasn't designed or laid it was formed by many walkers all needing to go the same way.  The beginning of it marks the gateway to a rural, carless environment. Graffiti: Imagine my amusement when I discover half way up the first section of path a huge penis graffitied onto the tarmac.  The urban occasionally slips through the gate..... Cocoon: I'm feeling antisocial. I am cocooned with my hood up.  It's scant protection from the other humans taking their Sunday stroll.  Sometimes my skin is too thin to be around them. Being cocooned made me consider the car as a vacuum.  We arrive disconnected from the environment, cut off, cocooned.  When we exit the car on arrival we are abandoned by the familiar hermetic pod.  When we walk, in contrast to this, we are in process, adjustments are made and make walking an act of travel

Route: wandering across fields in the direction of Sharpham Duration: 1 hour Time of Day: midday Using the book Body Space Image by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay (1990) I considered my body travelling through the space, the relationship to space and the displacement of space. I tried a deeper investigation found in the chapter Landscapes . Coincidentally there are five prompts (or scores) for use in this improvisation: shedding: shed self image, plans, worries, socialised behaviour                  ask questions - who or what you are/can become                  see your relation to the whole                     (yourself as just one ingredient of a whole piece) being receptive: be present - keep your attention bright                              (don't lose receptivity when in action)                            give time, waiting                              (if necessary past the point of boredom)                            let thing draw attention to thems

https://soundcloud.com/beth-heaney/walk-no2m4a

Route: PCA to Plymouth Arts Centre Duration: 10 mins Time of Day: Midday Recording with only photos. It's a different experience - the walk  and  the recollection - to using my own memory devices/strategies. Thinking in images and not ideas is the inverse of receiving/unearthing ideas from prompts along the route. Understanding the selected frames and their content in the context of  Drawing and Walking theory is research I will contrast with the other lines  of enquiry I'm running.

Route: House to bench along river path and back Duration: Half an hour Time of Day: Early Morning Borders: If you look carefully the spray paint has passed through the fence to the wall behind and literally shows a stance on borders.  Every time I pass this wall I feel good. Borders, divisions, limits, imprisonment, confines: containment, security, control. I read these words in terms of drawing and they are positive.  But the language is darker in a social context. Wall:   Another wall, one adjacent to Morrison's car park.  A new wall to prevent the anticipated flooding over the next 100 years.  To Millie, the dog, it allows easy entry into the car park (where there is anticipated food and a lot of irritated shoppers loading their cars).  I spend a long time persuading her to come back to the path.  The designated walking path.  No borders was not good in this case..... Slippage: My wellies are worn out and have no grip and I slip in them a lot.  It shoc

Route: Around a car park Duration: 10 Mins Time of Day: Evening Contravening: Interloping: Island: Alignment: Flatness:

Route: Home to Dartington Duration: 45 Mins Time of Day: Early Morning Playlist: Oh Word? (Beastie Boys) Yonkers (Tyler, The Creator) Agent Shadrin (Trishes) Ooh Wee (Mark Ronson, Ghostface) Pablo Picasso (Jonathon Richman and The Modern Lovers) Walking with really decent headphones on. Bubble.  Protection.  Extra rhythms. Attitude.

Route: Home to Vire Island Duration: 5 mins Time of day: Evening Metaphor: Delueze and Lefebvre have something to say about this.  It's ok to use that word again.  I used to like it but it felt outdated.  Now it lives again.  Collage:  I start to imagine the walk being documented in different modes but simultaneously.  The mash up makes me think of collage: I've recently begun trying things out in collage again. I think there has to be a combination of forms to express these ideas.  Territory:  I'm a female walking alone.  It's dark already.  Having just wandered around London, on my own, at night, in the dark, my blase attitude to this has crystallised into hypervigilance.  It changes the space - the time of day, the language of the space, subtext of threat that is rational and known in the urban environment compared to the rural threats of the supernatural, magical where there's more space (semiotic) for the imagination. Owl: Echo sound.  Echo location to

Route: River path towards Dartington Duration: 45 mins Time of Day: Morning Foot traffic: Runaway: Phone Call: Erosion: Home?:

Route: Totnes High Street Duration: 1 very slow hour Time of Day: early afternoon Inherited: Dislocated: Uncanny: Sheepskins: Tombola Tombola:

Route: Barbican Tube Station to Barbican Centre Duration: 15 mins Time of Day: late morning All the B’s Barbican: Baggage: Basquiat: Behaviour: Body-less:

Route: no specific route, derive - central London Duration: 6 hours Time of day: late afternoon into evening Map: resisting the urge to use the map (a shitty tourist freebie from the hostel), part pride - I know London like the back of my hand hahaha- and part intention for research. Later, I get given a gallery guide map and the gallery (Ordovas) is so tiny, the work so recognisable (Warhol and Lichtenstein) that I make a real point of playing with it because it's really quite redundant.  It's a fun show. Giant green polyurethane cactus (Guido Drocco and Franco Mello, Radiant Cactus 2017) encourage you to weave in and out and create lines and routes. It's a reprieve from the intensity of the streets. Hyper awareness: It's been so long since I was last in London I feel the uncomfortable sensation of being out of a comfort zone. It seems Devon has changed me. Parochial-ness has grabbed me. I am wide eyed and gullible and over stimulated after five minutes of walkin

Route: PCA towards Drake's Circus and back Duration: 10 Mins Time of day: Afternoon Today we are given a task in our seminar on 'seeing' that is a research method I have been experimenting with so it was an interesting exercise to hear how the cohort responded and how I responded (having been so habitual in this it was a challenge to do it with even more consciousness). Derive -  Guy Debord. An unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relation and 'let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and encounters they find there. We were to take a walk in Plymouth City Centre, document this however we liked and then come back and discuss with a group. I chose to limit myself to sounds but noted down as my usual five word/phrase list: Angle Grinder  Oasis Traffic Chatting Punk We shared the findings in a seminar setting later on.  I hadn't really absorbed what I heard, my walk hadn'

Route: Home to Dartington Primary School Duration: 1 hour approx. Time of day: Morning Soles:   Slippage on the wet leaves, it's raining a lot.  Texture of the bottom of my foot against sock against shoe.  The idea of feeling through the soles of the shoe the surface of the path. Robin: Unspoken dialogue with a robin, so close it appeared fake. Held my gaze: frozen for ages. Some weird representation of my conscience. Pre-raphaelite:  Under the railway bridge the foliage just under the water makes an image that evokes John Everet Mills' Ophelia, I used to stare at this for long periods of time in the Tate.  I drift into a romantic, imaginative odyssey. Think of the word peregrinations... I'm off on a journey within a journey. Shedding: Trees shedding leaves, me shedding coats and scarves as I warm up with walking.  Also shedding worries as I gradually pound away at the path, feeling more and more like myself. Weave: bridges/river/paths  criss crossing, gridlike,

Route: Sharpham Lane Duration: 20 Mins Time of day: Afternoon Pavement - (parking - builderman)  Libido - cycle, female swagger,  Tree - Reminder of time, cycles, locates me in the present Feather - Magpie, superstition 'One for sorrow....' reminds me of other walking superstitions like walking under ladders... Bridges - Old and New - Prompts a thought about the purpose of the bridges.  The old one can't take the incredible amount of traffic,  it can't adapt.  It's congested and stressful to walk on, it's hard to pass other pedestrians coming the other way and you almost always end up in the road.  The other bridge is modern(ish) and was designed with vehicles in mind.   (see Noticing paper via Kim)

Route: Sharpham lane up and down Duration: 20 mins Time of day: v early morning Thinking - behind thinking, behind thinking, behind thinking - thinking about all the layers of thinking. Shorthand - a mark encapsulating thinking = shorthand.  And how to encapsulate my walks, how to create a shorthand. Cartesian  - My mind flows faster than my hand, I begin to separate the hand from the mind, writing is not an easy extension of mind.  Is this an experience of  a cartesian mind/soul-body split...... How can I imagine the hand and mind being whole.  Does drawing in an instinctive way achieve this? Poverty - A recurring thought, as I often walk past grandeur, materialism and plain old rich people's houses - nose up against the window -  of the privilege of leisure walking, the Idler, the Flaneur, and walking/wandering as a frivolous endeavour, an activity reserved for the wealthy.  What purpose is there to walking if not to get somewhere?  Walter Benjamin used walking to re

Route: House to Sharpham Duration: 1hour Time of Day: Morning Vertical - Planes of movement and the pull of gravity Planes - Passenger planes overhead, Planes of dimension, folding and unfolding Flight - Birds, Planes, Layers, Delueze flights of imagination... Traffic - Everpresent hum of traffic, even in the middle of the fields two miles away. Percussion - The rhythm of my wellies and the song of the birds creates a cubed sound scape.

Route: Bus stop to Riviera Centre, Torquay Duration: 10 mins Time of Day: morning Tom - My eldest son.  A walking companion, a witness to the walk.  We talk as we observe things, nothing changes whether they are 3 or 18 but the pendulum of knowledge has swung so it is him who informs me now. We talk about documenting the walks.  He talks of distance and time as horizontal planes and then I begin to think of the movement as mass going through these planes or axis.  It's a way to represent motion. Promenade - Torbay in all it's sunny glory this morning.  I remember my 'home' town, Blackpool.  How I was obsessed with the idea of Promenading and Piers for quiet some time.  Contrived leisure walking.... Scenic Route - We're not sure of the way and at one point there's a winding scenic route that may possibly be a dead end or the straight road (up close with the traffic) I'm happy to report that my kid is a fellow 'wayfarer': we took the scenic

Route: House to Totnes Train Station Duration: 15 Mins Time of Day: Morning Traffic Smell - It's cold and so the smell of the fumes from car exhausts is thick.  The air is dirty. Zebra Crossing - I set foot on the zebra crossing and a car neglects to stop. I nearly get run over. I think about the intersections, the crossings and remember Tim Ingold's interpretation of this.  At this point the reality that it's on the pedestrian to be alert and watch out for traffic and not the other way round is colouring my day and also what I go on to notice. The road/line of the driver is mapped and strict.  They are more or less relieved of autonomy and isolated from the immediate experience of movement in a system of simple obedience. (My mother believes this is why I have never learnt to drive.....) Neighbours - I notice the neighbours getting into their car and then, as I'm passing the surgery (half a mile later),  I see them getting out of the car in the sur

Route: Bus Stop to PCA Duration: 5 Mins Time of Day: Morning I didn't expect or intend to be documenting this particular part of my day.  Things/events revealed themselves to me and if they gave me food for thought or felt significant I then tried to remember them, tried to capture or bottle them.  It's not practical to write as I walk.  So I began to attach one word to each finger and kept repeating them, reminding me of the shopping list game.....  I went to the shops and I bought some butter.  I went to the shops and I bought some butter and a pint of milk.  I went to the shops and I bought some butter and a pint of milk and a bottle of gin..... I chanted to myself: Commuter Tide 8.40 Clothes Subway Channels This is what I remember from those word prompts: I took the bus instead of the train to Plymouth as an experiment.  The results weren't great as I emerged from the bus with motion nausea (trying to read on a rural bus is not a good idea). People are