Walking Sidelong

LJ and I have got our first commission together!

Some time ago I blogged about the idea of curated walks and my intention to collaborate with LJ Klee, a colleague at Nottingham Contemporary, to investigate our mutual interest in walking.  To kick off our collaboration, we have just received a commission to create a Night Walk, which we are calling Dream Walking, as part of Nottingham's Light Night Festival on 10th February 2012.

Not all our walks need to be in Nottingham, but it seemed a good place to start!  We have spent a couple of evenings exploring streets around Nottingham City Centre and through our conversation have discovered a number of shared interests or strands of thought.  We decided to call our collaboration Sidelong as the word suggests some of our interests:  we both have an interest in the idea of getting off the beaten track, looking at things differently from different viewpoints, exploring side streets and liminal space, looking above eye level, finding and revealing the hidden, going against the grain.

Reflecting on the last few weeks, I am aware of the various curatorial elements of a number of things I am involved with, and how they are all starting to relate to each other through my perception of it.  Which, in fact, is a bit like curating my own life!  With the work with objects, with New Walk Museum and Klaus Weber's current exhibition (see previous post) I have seen how connections are made between different objects when they are brought together, and I like how Weber has spoken about objects working as individual words in a letter, but that can be "read" in different directions.  I see how my mapping and walking of different routes become an act of curating, in the way your thoughts frame the route and the experience of that route to reveal a theme or character.  This also differs in the direction that you walk a route - last night LJ and I found ourselves walking a route we had previously walked but from the other direction, and in the dark instead of in the daytime, and were amazed at how different our memory of the walk was and how easily confused we were in trying to find familiar things!

You can follow our work as Sidelong on our blog, sidelonguk.blogspot.com, and find out more about Dream Walking and Nottingham Light Night.  Perhaps see you there?