In a continuing series throughout the duration of The Walking Encyclopaedia, we'll be highlighting, daily, the works of several practitioners who employ the walk within their practice. Each of the highlighted artists and artworks were submitted for exhibition to The Walking Encyclopaedia. In each case alongside their artist statement, a link to the artist's website is provided for further exploration.
The Walking Encyclopaedia is a co-production between AirSpace Gallery and the Walking Artists Network.
#63 Lucy Harrison
Mapping Your Manor
Mapping Your Manor was conceived by Lucy Harrison in 2011, in response to Ackroyd and Harvey’s Mapping the Park art commission.
The project involved making audio recordings with people who live or work near to each of 10 trees planted as part of Ackroyd and Harvey’s commission, to be listened to in those places. The tracks are available to download from the project website as MP3 files. There is also a book documenting the project and containing further information and images about each of the locations, which can be ordered by contacting Lucy Harrison and paying £2.00 P&P.
The soundtracks are intended to be used while walking around and through the Olympic Park, although they can also be enjoyed elsewhere. Mapping Your Manor was commissioned by the Olympic Delivery Authority and supported by Arts Council England.
 
Lucy Harrison is
an artist based in London. Her recent work investigates the subjective nature
of the experience of place and connections between memory, location and
architecture. It takes the form of photographs, book works, video and various
forms of printed and published material. Her projects often engage with the public realm
through collaboration, encounter and exchange, and involve residents of a place
in the work.
The
process Lucy uses to work with groups of people varies, and ranges from
collecting oral histories which are used in audio works and films, to inviting
people to re-imagine the places where they live, producing collaborative
alternative guidebooks, maps and posters. The notion of the guided tour or walk
is enacted in different ways with different groups, and new ways of exploring
place and community are considered through collected texts, photography and
audio recording. With some projects this can become a playful activity which is
then presented in formats mimicking more official publications and ephemera.
Her
most recent project is Carnaby Echoes, which
investigated some of the less well known musical heritage of the Carnaby Street
area, including early jazz clubs and a ska reggae club which despite being
highly influential in the 1960s was not always given the mainstream coverage it
deserved. The project culminated in a series of films available online, a
mobile phone app, and plaques marking out 15 buildings on the Carnaby estate. www.carnabyechoes.com
Other
recent projects include Mapping Your
Manor (2011), a commission for the Olympic Delivery Authority which
culminated in a series of audio recordings made with people who live or work
near to the edge of the Olympic Park.
During the past
few years she has developed projects such as Canvey Guides, (2007), which involved working with local residents
to make an ‘alternative’ guide to the island, and included the setting up of
the Rendezvous Walking Club. In 2008 she worked on a commission for Art on the
Underground at Stratford station, east London, and produced a newspaper called The Stratford Grapevine, written by
people who live or work in Stratford and given away in the station to
passers-by.
Lucy Harrison graduated from the Royal College
of Art’s Printmaking MA in 1999.
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#64 - Marisa Culatto
Walking Fearless
 
These are pictures – close ups - of motorway barriers taken in several exploratory walks through the motorways in Gran Canaria. The barriers are commonly known there as “quitamiedos” (fear removers), possibly because they warn drivers of where the edge of the road – or their lane - is, giving them a false sense of security. Paradoxically, motorcycle drivers are terrified of them, because in the event of a fall, they are known to sever their limbs and even decapitate them. I also have to be completely fearless to photograph them, because they are all located on roads and motorways, and, to do so, I have to walk along them contending with quite fast traffic. So hence their title.
Conceptually there is a certain amount of defiance on my part, since I deliberately move on foot through paths designed and meant for the car. Formally, my interest in them has to do with the beauty of the anodyne –the overlooked- and deterioration: the amazing patterns and textures that weather, pollution, and chemical or bacterial action leave on manmade structures. I am fascinated by the different ways the picture can go, depending on the type or quantity of traffic, climate conditions, etc. of where they are, or the length of time they’ve been there. To some, the language employed here is more that of painting than photography. I present the series in pairs because I am also interested in the dialogue between the two images. 
Untitled (Walk), 2007 is a photographic walking sequence. Earlier in my artistic practice, walking was an intrinsic part of my work, since part of my methodology involved taking the camera with me on journeys of exploration, and my earlier series demonstrate this. On a personal level I am also a committed walker for many reasons, ranging from pleasure to health not forgetting philosophical and ethical.
I am also a mother, and mine is a family who walks. After some time I realised that, every time we walked together, I took pictures of my family walking away from me. I knew this was of emotional significance and wanted to explore the matter further. Therefore, Untitled (Walk) is a deliberate piece set up as a sequence of 8 images in which you see my family moving further and further away from me. In this occasion I am also in the picture in the shape of an elongated shadow, projected on the path by a very low Canarian winter sun. The walking action is depicted in a very graphic way: not only there is a clear path for the walkers, but there is also a high metal tower which acts as a marking towards which they are walking. My family starts off from under my shadow, which remains static on the ground while they clearly move further and further away.
To me these are bitter sweet images. The weather is sunny and the family is wearing bright colours. But the low sun and the dark solitary shadow convey a certain sadness.
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#65 - Marlene Creates
Points of Interest
Marlene Creates is an environmental artist and poet who lives and works in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, Canada. She was born in Montreal, studied visual arts at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and lived in Ottawa for twelve years before moving to Newfoundland in 1985—the home of her maternal ancestors, who were from Lewisporte and Fogo Island.
For over thirty years her work has been an exploration of the relationship between human experience, memory, language and the land, and the impact they have on each other. In the late 1970s she started creating temporary landworks which she photographed (Paper, Stones and Water, 1979-1985). This led to several years of working with what she called ‘memory maps’ which were drawn for her by other people (The Distance Between Two Points is Measured in Memories, 1986-1988, and Places of Presence: Newfoundland kin and ancestral land, 1989-1991).
For Full Bio - visit website.
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Line Down Manhattan 
On New Years Eve 2003, I drew a chalk line down the length of Manhattan Island from Broadway Bridge to Battery Park. Line Down Manhattan is a video (of various lengths), a collection of still images, and two worn down lumps of raw chalk threaded through with pull rope fluffed from snagging. These objects contain physical information and evidence of the performance, impossible to capture in two-dimensional documentary imagery. The chalk and rope remnants of the action have three-dimensional surfaces textured and scuffed with the dirt, granite and asphalt of Manhattan's sidewalks, they are souvenir artefacts realising the action into the current day. At the time I intended the work as a temporary stroke down the American Indian path (Broadway) in response to 9/11. In retrospect I understand that the iconic image of the place (Manhattan Island) easily conjures a picture in the minds eye, so that telling people "I drew a chalk line down the length of Manhattan Island", might also be interpreted as a performative work. Speaking a work in this way also playfully raises a possible slippage of truth, did I or did I not actually walk the length of Manhattan Island? Although I relish the escape such slippage allows into imagination, my curiosity also seeks the physical (though not the rigorous endurance), and phenomenological experience of place. In "Line down Manhattan" my body inhabits the work while it becomes and through the haptic connection of marking and making my senses are activated, and the serendipity of materials (their unexpected reactions to each other and to my actions), keeps my practice alive.
 While editing the 8 hours of video recorded during the drawing process, I became very aware of how sound reveals character of place, and this realisation had a significant impact on my practice, leading me to investigate how sound can reveal and interact with the physical material, the conditions and the dimensions of place.
Maryclare Foá was born in Cumbria, she began her art education at City and Guilds Art School and went on to study at the Royal College of Art. In 1984 she graduated with an MA in Illustration and was awarded the RCA Drawing Prize for her drawings of the Arctic and Papua New Guinea.
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#67 - Michael Mayhew - To ArT ~ A Walk
To ArT ~ a WaLk ~ Michael Mayhew
A film: 52 minutes 56 seconds
A series of stills taken on a series of walks down the same streets through changing seasons.
This repetitive and habitual walk is a daily practice that is undertaken by billions of people globally.
The same walk daily.
What do we see, hear and experience?
What is changing?
All though these habitual walks are taken over the same terrains, past the same buildings, that terrain is forever altering in shifting light, discarded leftovers, seasonal shifts and overturns.
I wanted to ask, could this walk be a creative habit?
Could I arrive @ art and make a new film from the image and sound recordings I make of the perpetual changing landscape I pass through.
Could the habitual drudgery become a creative act?
This walk is from my home in Fallowfield, Manchester to my studio (art) located in Whalley Range, Manchester.
Each walk has its own set of rules and structures, weather that simply to photograph the liner narrative of the walk or to photograph the visual noise of discarded debris from other walker/pedestrians or to be image taking the lefts and rights @ junctions, the sky or bursting activity of spring, to the bareness of trees.
Non of the images have been treated in anyway used directly as low resolution images and dropped into i-movie.
Most films have been edited within the hour of arriving at art.
The sound recordings from these walks have been made on the walks and manipulated to extend the creative process of a repetitive and habitual walk.
Directions to art:
Open door / step out / swivel 90 degrees right / close door / insert key / lock / swivel 30 degrees left / walk to the end of the short avenue / right down alleyway / past the discarded bed, plastic cup, plastic bins scattered like drunks ~ blue, green, black / keep going until you hit a long street / left / walk down the one way street / straight on @ the cross roads / go over the ‘NO ENTRY’ sign / get to the T Junction / angle right over the road / left at the T Junction / pelican crossing / press the button / wait for the green man / cross / right / first left / silver birches drape the sky / fragile . . . always fragile / walk forwards / nod at the guy wearing the camouflage you see daily standing at the gate of his house / "alright” / past the black cat / hit the parkway / turn right / a stream of steel batters the tarmac / a constant flow/ get across the road when you can / the garage / right / left down the ginnal / walk away from reverb of combustion / beneath heavy trees / past the park /
the park
/ walk forwards / the park on your right / student accommodation / bright eyes / keep going / park on your right / cross over main road / forwards / great old house / burnt down / cross over / forwards / barking dogs / T Junction / cross over / right / past the school / the lolly pop lady / the empty telephone box / left / school on your left / walk down the road / an urban forest /housing / doors / windows and cars parked / a gothic building on your left / beautiful bend in the road / more an arch swoop / turn left when you get there / you can’t miss it / that house burnt down / someone has just moved into that one / cross over / mind the kerbs / high / look for a mews / on your right / tiny houses squeezed tight packed / there she is sweeping her step / get to the end / turn right / drop into the alleyway / black cat / alleyway leading to art / on your left / first unit / art in the window /
Equipment:
An 8 year old Sony Ericsson.
Mac computer.
Audacity and i-movie
Michael Mayhew is a visual performance artist, working within a multi-disciplinary praxis. Mayhew has walked across deserts, through cities and mountains around the world, not purely has a mode of transport but as a way of discovering. Walking is a gateway to discovering the rhythms of Space, Place, & People. He is cited by John E McGrath (Director National Theatre of Wales) ‘as one of the most original and searching artists currently working in the UK.’ His work has been described thus; “it moves and changes people’s lives ~ it’s important, significant and influential.” (Lois Keidan, Director Live Art Development Agency). His praxis has been commissioned at a national & international level, as well as being awarded and nominated by the likes of Dance Umbrella, Manchester Evening News, Time Out, Russian Union of Artists, Barclays New~Stages, PRS Foundation, (British Composer of the Year Award).
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#68 - Mick Douglas
Mick Douglas works across art, performance and design to make socially engaged and live art works exploring the performance of mobility, hospitality, cultural change practices and sustainability. Past projects have engaged with modes of transport including tramways in Kolkata and Melbourne, buses in Karachi, cycling in Australia, the Indian subcontinent and Europe, and standardised shipping via containers and boxes. Recent works have explored the walking body as a practice for encountering and elaborating social and material forces.
Douglas is an Australian artist and researcher at RMIT University, Melbourne, where he supervises PhD creative practiced-based research.
Container Walk
 Container Walk, Mick Douglas 2013, during the Performance Arcade, Wellington, New Zealand.
walk
walk into a shipping container
walk nowhere
walk time
walk labour
walk with
walk on
For ten hours over four days the artist walks on a bed of seasalt inside a shipping container, exploring the walking of time, walking nowhere, walking exchange and change, walking pattern and uncertainty, walking material relations. After the artist has walked 80 kilometres by the forth day – the distance the salt travelled by sea from its place of commercial harvesting to the Wellington Harbour – the public is invited to walk the seasalt 10 metres to be returned to seawater of the Wellington Harbour.
 
Auto Yard Walk
AutoYard Walk, Mick Douglas 2013, 1067 PacificPeople, an artist’s run initiative, Brooklyn New York, 26-27 April 2013.
Walk
Walk labour
Walk a former auto yard in Brooklyn
Walk global urban processes walk local lives
Walk debris walk opportunity walk auto-mobility
Walk oil walk carbon walk economy
Walk circles walk revolutions
Walk by walk on
Walk with
Walk
   Feedback Walk 
Feedback Walk, Mick Douglas 2013.
Walk
Walk land
Walk art
Walk land-art walk art world
Walk solid walk liquid walk gas
Walk affects walk effects
Walk aside
Walk
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#69 - Mira Mutka http://miramutka.com/
Extra Short Dance #1-9
I am working on choreographic works connected to walking and ongoingness,
alongside performing and teaching. I am currently a part of the MA program
New Performative Practices at DOCH in Stockholm, Sweden.
Extra Short Dance #1-9 with extra short music by Anders Rimpi is a series
of simple and short dances based on walking. The series is filmed with a
basic cell phone camera in Lidköping, Mariestad, Läcko- Kinnekulle,
Gothenburg / Sweden and Brooklyn, New York/USA in 2009.
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#70 - Misha Myers
way from home is a project created by Misha Myers working in partnership with UK refugee support organisations that explored mapping, walking and talking as creative strategies to reveal transnational perspectives, experiences, and knowledge of refugees and asylum seekers to public officials. Participants in the project were invited to create an impromptu hand-drawn sketch map of a route from a place they consider home to a special place with significant landmarks marked along the way. Following this map as a guide, an improvised walk was then taken elsewhere. The landmarks encountered in the present environment were transposed and re-named with those coinciding remembered landmarks of the map. The work from way from home submitted for the Walking Encyclopaedia exhibition includes two sets of instructions for a walk created as part of the project: a one-paged version published as an insert for the ‘On the Page’ issue of the Performance Research journal (2004) and an early prototype created for the British Council Sense of Belonging conference with support from Arts Council of England (2003). In addition, a digital online artwork including audio recordings and interactive versions of participants’ sketch maps from the project created by digital collaborators Dan Harris and Adam Child is available on the following related project websites:
Walking Library: Sideways (2012)
The Walking Library is an ongoing art project created by Misha Myers and Dee Heddon, that seeks to bring together walking and books. Walking with a library of books, we wonder what these literary companions add to the journey; how collective reading and writing in situ affects the experience of the journey, the landscape and the experience of walking; how journeying and the landscape affects the experience of reading; how reading affects the experience of writing; and how a walk, as a space of knowledge production, is written and read. Through walking, reading and writing together we create an immersive and moving space, a kind of mobile laboratory. Each Walking Library we create responds to – is specific to – the context of its walking. Each walk changes the shape – the content and the actions – of the library. As with all good libraries, the Walking Library facilitates a peripatetic reading group as it journeys, allowing engagement with and reflection on the Walking Library’s content, and some sketching with words or images. Stories are also left in the library books’ cards by those who suggest or donate additions to the library’s collection, collectively forming an autobibliography. The work submitted for the Walking Encyclopaedia exhibition includes a book telling the story of the Walking Library created for the Sideways Festival, an art festival ‘in the open' and 'on the go' that travelled 334 km on foot, crossing from the West to the East of Belgium August 17th to September 17th 2012. This book mixes our reflections and voices with those of the other Walking Librarians that accompanied us – Monique Besten, Louise Douse, Lucy Frears, Lynn Goh, Agnieszka Gratza, Hilary Ramsden, Tom Stone and Amanda Young. It also includes those of donors who left their stories in book covers and the card catalogue and those who joined the reading and writing group and left their own thoughts, stories and impressions in the Walking Library notebooks. The catalogue reproduced here tells its own story too – of the many relationship that exist between books, walking and reading.
Project website: www.walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com
Take me to a place (2004)
Take me to a place is a map of songs, which guides the listener on a walk in Plymouth. The audio walk was conceived and directed by Misha Myers and songs were devised by a group of international residents of the city including refugee and asylum seeker inhabitants together with theatre and social work exchange students. The songs are based on walks taken by the group to different places in the city, which they perceived as: ‘friendly places’, ‘lucky places’, ‘lost places’, ‘border places’, ‘places of power’, ‘quiet places’, ‘avoided places’, and ‘places of strength’. The songs guide the listener on a walk to some of these locations, and were based on the group’s associations, perceptions and experiences of these places.
Take me to a place was performed as a live performance at the Plymouth Barbican (4 June 2004), and recorded and produced onto an audio CD at Plymouth’s Music Zone (2004). A website including a downloadable and online version of the map of songs, along with the way from home digital artwork, was published online with the help of the Institute of Digital Arts and Technology at University of Plymouth (2006, available at www.homingplace.org) and is available at: www.soundcloud.com/homingplace
Members of the group that devised the songs of Take Me to a Place include Gulio Gherbi, Ous Almolhim, Sam Alty, Joe Amphlett, Yelena Brikova, Monika Beadowski, Rachel Bailey, Joy Chaney, Lauren Cumes, Sophie Dyke, Gulio Gherbi, Wael Hamond, Clementine Jones, Katharine Kavanagh, Dilbrin Ramazan Mohammad, Mohammed Rezaei, Igor Stoskov, Katie Warner, Doris Zaharia. The project was supported through a grant from Dartington Plus with in-kind support from Barbican Theatre, TR2, Plymouth Arts Centre and Music Zone and the project’s website was designed by Digital Arts and Technology at University of Plymouth and supported by Writing Research Associates.
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