Walking Scores
The walking scores series grew out of my Future Wales Fellowship research into our relationship with nature.
I am interested in how we move through wild spaces and how we invite them to speak with us, particularly through the tactile means of communication that is shared by all beings. In looking for a more sensorial mode of communication in my own explorations, I began to document approaches that had worked for me, as invitations to others. The first of these was a score for walking with a coracle, a set of instructions (for myself) that emerged from experiences I had walking with my hand-made coracle in Eryri during the Fellowship and the lessons I was taught by the elements and the landscape.
I have been experimenting with creating scores that can be taken to any location, including one for walking in the night time, and with the development of scores for specific landscapes. Alongside this I am leading guided group Walks to the Edges – with past journeys including a winter series of full moon walks to the sea in Folkestone Warren; experiments with silent walking and embodied arrival at Stackpole in Pembrokeshire; and an experiment in how layers of different people’s experience of place might be integrated through a public workshop at Samphire Hoe.
A residency on Ynys Enlli supported the draft creation of two scores that relate to natural features of the island and offers routes to two “edge” spaces – the top of the mountain and the cavern at the very furthest southerly point. They are intended as an invitation to day visitors to go deeper with their experience and to take a single long and slow journey in which the land, water and wind lead the way.
I am also exploring a new practice of mapping spaces with the body through balance and trust, moving with rocky edge spaces to find the limits and possibilities of the body and the rock in a reciprocal exchange. With the working title “Dancing with Rocks” this may evolve into a new work that offers a more place-led approach to mapping, where the sensory encounter defines the documentation of the journey.
I am continuing my research through ecosomatic practices and developing ways in which the scores might be read or heard, whether within the landscape itself, or as a separate more ephemeral layer, and this research is gradually being layered into new public facing work.
