projects
Pigment is an ongoing research and creative project exploring geology, colour, walking and place through the collection and making of pigments gathered from Fleetwith Pike and the Honister Pass in the Lake District. The work combines walking, drawing, printmaking and material experimentation, and will develop into exhibitions, publications and guided walks.
In July 2023, I was diagnosed with pre-invasive breast cancer (Ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS). This diagnosis led to a series of surgeries that took place over a six month period. Throughout – in a body of work entitled Becoming Rock – I used photography, film, and drawing to document my experience and emplaced (and photographed) my body in various landscape sites chosen for their physical, psychological and metaphorical resonance.
Walking the Menopause developed from my own experience of surgical menopause and has grown into a series of site-specific menopause-walks across Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Through walking, conversation and creative mapping, the project explores how menopause is experienced, remembered and understood through landscape.
The Quarried Body (2021–2025) is a body of work exploring radical hysterectomy, surgical menopause and recovery through photography, drawing, printmaking and site-specific performance. Bringing together documentary and scenographic images with medical materials, the work examines relationships between surgery, excavation and landscape.
Tell it to the Bees was a honeybee-inspired walking-performance specifically created for Exeter city centre. The performance led participants on a route through the city centre and, pausing at a number of locations where through words, music, film and actions time, reflected upon the relevance of these traditions to experiences during the Covid-19 Pandemic and our recovery from it.
During the spring-summer lockdown (and beyond) people have created memory-maps of walks they have not been able to do phyically. I have now compiled a gallery of the maps, words and photos of those who shared their remembered walks with me.
Image: Awena Carter's Walk Around the Cwm: ‘To Walk was My Delight’ memory map.
‘what a labour of joy and love it has been….‘there are so many memories of people woven into the walk’ (Awena Carter, 2020)
Lockdown in Lancaster and Morecambe: Walk, Run, Pedal, Push, Map makes visible the paths and places that participating residents of Lancaster and Morecambe visited during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring-summer 2020. These are the paths and places that gave us breathing space – mentally, emotionally and physically.
Dorothy's Room is an immersive installation originally created in Dorothy Wordsworth’s bedroom at Rydal Mount in Ambleside, Cumbria and inspired by Dorothy’s Rydal Journals in which she was bed-bound relying on memory to transport herself into the landscape she had once walked. Dorothy's Room is a companio to the related Women's Walks to Remember: 'With Memory I was there.'
Women’s Walks to Remember: 'With Memory I was there' is a ‘surrogate’ walking-art project specific to the Lake District that re-walks significant walks of those who are no longer able to walk them. The walk might have been for work, leisure, adventure, health, remembrance, creativity, science, companionship or solitude. The reason that the walk can no longer be done might be due to the effects of ageing, illness, accident or circumstance.
The process of creating Mulliontide (2016) led to a project entitled Harold's Walk: A Walk to Remember.
A new site-specific performance-installation entitled Remembrance: Returning, We Hear The Larks (November 2018). Created in and for Lancaster Priory to mark the centenary of the end of World War One as part of Light Up Lancaster 2018
Mulliontide was a coastal walking-perofmance from Poldhu Cove to Mullion Cove in Cornwall that focused on a much-loved landscape and explores the places where land, sea and people meet. The performance noticed the effects of tide and time, acknowledged deep feelings for place and recognised the challenges of change – personal and topographical.
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Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting on In/Fertility and Childlessness is a self guided walk specific to, and created in, Warnscale, an area of fells to the south of Buttermere Lake.
The Gathering / Yr Helfa was a site-specific walking-performance based on the annual fertility, reproductive and life-cycles of the ewes at Hafod y Llan Farm, Snowdon, Wales.
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Fissure (20 - 22 May 2011), was a unique walking performance that unfolded over three days in the Yorkshire Dales. It was an extraordinary encounter between artists, scientists, audiences and landscape that explored life, death, grief and renewal.
Ghost Bird (15 & 16 September 2012), was a silent walking-performance and live-art installation specific to the Langden Valley in the Trough of Bowland, an upland landscape internationally important for its heather moorland, blanket bog and rare birds.
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Jack Scout (17 - 26 Sept 2010) was a walking-performance specific to Jack Scout, an intimate location in Silverdale, Lancashire, of bewitching beauty and extraordinary aesthetic, cultural and scientific value overlooking the vast sands and tides of Morecambe Bay.
Still Life was an intertidal performance specific to the sands of Morecambe Bay and the shoreline at Far Arnside in Sept 2008 and rev. 2009. It was created and performed by Louise Ann Wilson and Nigel Stewart.