A Walk Through the Underworld

We are very excited about our new Sidelong project we've just launched, A Walk Through the Underworld, about the experience of exploring Nottingham's caves. Please read the post on our Sidelong blog to find out more and sign up for updates to keep informed.

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Ways of Mapping Dukes Wood

A carpet of wood anemones

I have visited Dukes Wood now (as part of a new project there by Ordinary Culture) in the winter and more recently as spring breaks through. Watching how the woods develop through the seasons, turning from a skeleton structure of dried hogsweed and spindly trees to an emerging lushness of wood anemone carpets and bursting bright green hawthorn leaves.

The first time I walked through the woods it was bucketing down. But in the winter months, without leaves or undergrowth to hide it, I could see the structure of things, the way climbers were twisting up tree trunks and the undulation of the earth where mining work had moved the soil. In my mind I mapped it in terms of structural routes, verticals and horizontals, connecting elements and paths.

The second time it was beautifully sunny and full of the promise of spring. Wild woodland flowers started appearing, intriguing green pushing up through the earth, not quite big enough to identify. This time I started mapping it as a forager might, looking for clues for what might grow where and the properties of plants that may appear in future months.

Suddenly a hare appeared on my path

The third time I mapped it for sounds. It was sunny again but incredibly windy, and the noise through the trees created squeaking noises in the northern side of the woods, and huge rushing sounds at the southern edge. The wind turbine viewed from the northerly edge of the woods generated a high pitched squeal as it turned.

New growth reaches for the sun

The woods are incredibly sensory places, this wood particularly so. It seems imperative that when I run my workshops at Dukes Wood later in the year they should include sensory mapping.

But there is another map at Dukes Wood. A secret underground map, a network of drilled holes for oil extraction. Nodding donkeys are dotted about and obvious. However the trail map for the woods, found in the museum, is peppered with little crosses that mark where the wells once were but are now hidden under the undergrowth, and marked with rectangles of manmade structures that are no longer there, just traces of them remain, the odd pipe sticking up or lying along the ground.

This is the other sense of Dukes Wood that I want to engage participants in. A sense of the unseen things, the layers of the site that have been built up by history and its former uses. A sense of the hidden world deep, deep under the ground. The special qualities of rock and millions of years of layering that made this place what it is, and produced the oil in between its cracks.

I am working on a workshop idea about layering: up above, on the ground, and below.

I will be running a school's workshop on site in July, and open public workshops at the end of August. Watch my list of events for details nearer the time, or sign up to my newsletter for updates.

Walking as rhythmic ritual

"In the mountains of eastern Tibet, walking long miles through oak forests to reach Minya Konka, I set my pace to a Spanish palindrome on the subject of pilgrimage: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural – "The path provides the natural next step". Its form cleverly acknowledges the transformative consequences of the pilgrimage, which turns the mind back upon itself, leaving the traveller both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirected."

"Rites of way: behind the pilgrimage revival", Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian, 9 June 2012 

A trip to Norwich Cathedral continued to develop my thoughts on walking as pilgrimage.
 
The quote from Robert Macfarlane above alludes once again to the idea of forward motion, of the rhythms of footsteps when walking that does something to connect us with our thought processes. In Norwich I was reminded that religion and its ritual has long understood this connection between the rhythms of walking and meditation.

Norwich Cathedral was a place of pilgrimage for centuries, attracting thousands to its walls. I am not aware of the paths that these pilgrims might have taken to reach here. However, walking the Cloisters of the cathedral, one can clearly feel the attitude of thoughtful perambulation that they were built for.

 
The very architecture of the Cloisters is built to evoke rhythms, to draw the walker on down the passageway (for me the image connects with Walter Benjamin's Parisian Arcades, an architecture for the religion of consumerism). The Cloisters form a circular route that can continue endlessly, extending the walk as long as it needs to be without ever leaving the building itself. The walker is allowed to connect with their internal meditations without interruption or being troubled by destination or navigation, merely allowing the repetitive motion of one foot in front of the other to continue rhythmically as long as is necessary.

In the centre of the cloisters is a low circular labyrinth. This is a new one, but an old idea; I have stumbled across many of these kind of labyrinths across the country. They were created for monks to walk the lines, twisting and turning as life itself, until reaching the central destination, a physical metaphor for the spiritual path through life to enlightenment. The labyrinth provides a form of pilgrimage for those devotees who cannot actually leave their location; a pilgrimage taking place in the mind through the physical walking of a delineated journey. (I walked one in York Minster where I had made an installation as part of Minster Nights 2009; as part of the event North Country Theater created a labyrinth in the Lady Chapel and invited people to walk the lines, then exchange a thought on paper dropped into a basket in the middle.)

This kind of walking is much like a chant, another repetitive and rhythmic form of meditation used by religious devotees.  "La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural"

Sympathetic Magic, Cosmic Rays and Archeo-Acoustics

LJ has written a new post on her blog following our adventures as Sidelong, exploring the caves of Nottingham for our new project. Click here to read Sympathetic Magic, Cosmic Ray Laboratory and Archeo-Acoustics.

Reflection, contemplation, light and dark

Opposites is a good theme for this time of year. Bringing light into the dark, with fireworks celebrating the turn of the year, as well as reflecting on the past year and looking forward to the new one.

What a perfect time, then, for the Light Walks for Dark Days exhibition, which Carole and I opened on December 20th in the little Bee Inspired workshop in Kettering.

Our exhibition aimed to bring lots of light into the dark days of December, and reflect on the past year of walking around Northamptonshire. Our Light Walk Team were there to act as hosts, and got stuck in to talking to visitors about their experience of the last year. It was great to see how their confidence had grown over time.

Our exhibition celebrated walking, seasons, growth, nature, weather and companionship. It celebrated generosity too through the sharing of food and our wonderful visitors brought their own foraged offerings to share at the gathering, including this beautiful bouquet made from dried leaves:

We screened our film for the first time too. The opening afternoon was really busy, packed with people and quite noisy, which was great! However it was lovely to sit down at 5 o'clock after everybody had gone with just Carolyn from N-STEP and Kate and Lorraine from Corby Community Arts, turn down the lights, drink a glass and watch the film through from beginning to end.

We had to put the film together quite quickly, using footage that had been shot during the walks throughout the year, and with a soundtrack stitched together from recorded conversations between Carole, me and the Reverend Richard Coles (the vicar of one of our explored places, Finedon, as well as a regular walker and broadcaster for Radio 4, who kindly agreed to be interviewed for our project.) So it was lovely to have the chance, after all the organisational mayhem to get the exhibition up and open, to just sit and look at what we had actually made!

The film is contemplative and impressionistic. The pace is much like a walk itself, a slow ramble, images of light and landscape merging one into another. Textures, weather, water and colour float across the screen as a simple voice soundtrack relate memories and impressions.

The process of putting the film together was interesting. We just had a whole lot of material to work with, moving imagery as well as recorded voices and sounds of birdsong and water running. There was no plan, no structure or storyboard, we simply took what we had and juggled it around. Gradually a structure suggested itself and we edited, edited, edited until we had 25 minutes with a coherent beginning and end.

I enjoyed this way of working, it was intuitive and creative and allowed layers of meaning to emerge, layering voice-overs with imagery and allowing one image to overlap into another. There were many wonderful moments in the opening event, and just one of my highlights was Lorraine's reaction. Having watched the film she said she would like to watch it again and really think through some of the things it suggested to her about walking. For me this encapsulated what I wanted, to create a film to quietly contemplate and to mull over. A film with the same feeling I have when I go on a walk.

We would like to tour our exhibition and film and would welcome suggestions for venues where we could recreate the installation.

The year of walks we did with the Light Walks Team of young people are documented on our collaborative blog, undiscoverednetworks.blogspot.com

Light Walks for Dark Days was made possible by funding from the National Lottery through Awards for All, from the Midlands Co-operative Society Ltd and support from N-STEP.

An Invitation

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Visible tracking

I've written before about my project Paths of Desire that started in 2004, a fascination with how people choose to move across a landscape and the trails that they leave. The idea resurfaces as a project every now and then, or perhaps never really leaves me.

When Anne-Marie Culhane asked me to lead a walk as part of her Back to Back series for the Fruit Routes project, the idea of Paths of Desire was strong. Anne-Marie had created a map of a route that leads to where a number of fruit trees and berried hedgerows can be found around the Loughborough campus, and this seemed like a path for those that desire the sweet tastes and juicy bounty. However, in response to the project, the original idea of Paths of Desire developed a new turn.

The notion behind the Back to Back series is that different artists and others (ecologists, historians, poets etc.) lead walks which respond to each others' walk, taking the walk before as a lead but also diverging away from it. The walk before mine was by artist/poet Paul Conneally and ecologist Ed Darby.

Paul and Ed had started thinking about the other users of the Fruit Routes, the fauna. Through their project they wanted to give the fauna a voice, by creating "Twoots", or non-digital Tweets - like using the format of Twitter, writing in only 140 characters, but writing it down and hanging it from a tree as a way of disseminating the words.

Taking this as a lead, I wondered about the paths of desire of the fauna. (This notion had been hanging in the air for a while - as I wrote in the February post Snow Tracks and Secret Lives) How different would they be to the paths laid down by humans, which generally form a straight line from point of origination (A) to point of destination(B)?

Certainly when I am foraging I begin to move through a landscape in a different way, zigzagging across pathways, scouring edges, looking over hedgerows. How were the birds, animals and insects moving around, foraging their way through nature's bounty? What lines do their paths make?

The track of Eduardo the magpie

So I started to track creatures. I would watch a bird or animal from a distance, noting the movements that they made until they disappeared out of site, and then marking that movement on the ground with string. The movements began to suggest thought processes: birds seemed to always close a circle of movement, returning to where they started from; a magpie seemed to cover an area of ground from one side to another methodically to scour every bit of grass; a midge flew from left to right in a figure eight as it climbed into the air.

Paul thought the idea followed the non-digital idea too, he described my pictures of tracks as non-digital geopositioning, using string and cocktail sticks.

What I was discovering about the behaviour of creatures was fascinating to me, so for my Fruit Routes walk I decided to introduce the idea of tracking creatures to the group of walkers.

We had a great response, around 20 people turned up for the walk. I had made small tracking bags with lo-tech kit in them for tracking: string, pegs, a pencil and a label. I explained how to track things and sent them off in small teams to see what they could find.

The path of a bumble bee

An ant walking a leaf

The group fully embraced the idea and created patterns of string beautifully around the orchard. They tracked wasps, a bumble bee, a magpie (that they named Eduardo) and an ant.

Wasps in flight

By marking the movements of creatures, we made visible the patterns of their tracks and revealed something about their nature that we couldn't previously see.

Following on from this idea of moving differently, Anne-Marie then asked the groups to lead each other blindfolded through the trees.

I watched them as they wandered around, crisscrossing the path so that they could find things to touch and smell. Had we tracked the blindfold-walkers paths I think they would have been surprised how much ground they covered!

 
Eventually we all found our way back to the Fruit Routes shed to eat soup and drink apple juice freshly made in the press.

I loved the tracking day and I will have to do this again. Thanks very much to Anne-Marie for asking me to be a part of it.