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 bec...

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 of...

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 th...

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 d...

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 ...

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....

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 ent...

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 pla...

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 w...

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 lo...

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...

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. ...

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