In a continuing series throughout the duration of The Walking Encyclopaedia, we'll be highlighting, daily, the works of three 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.
#19 - Bronwyn Preece
Bronwyn is an improvisational performance and walking eARThist and writer. She works site-specifically/sensitively interrogating the dichotomies between culture and 'nature', self and 'environment', seeking ways to overcome these binary constructs. She is the pioneer of earthBODYment: an eco-somatic exploratory approach to immersion with our surrounding world. She became Canada's first Certified Teacher of Action Theater™, studying with Master Improvisor Ruth Zaporah for more than 15 years. Bronwyn is a member of the trans-national Plantable Performance Research Collective, performing internationally, developing projects that creatively engage ecological dialogue. Bronwyn holds a MA and BFA in Applied Theatre and is currently pursuing a PhD, which involves performing a series of solo improvisational performances that examine what an ecological self is or can be, and what the overlaps between Ecology and Disability are in this age. Bronwyn is the author of Gulf Islands Alphabet and the forthcoming Off-the-Grid Kid and In the Spirit of Homebirth. She is a modern homesteader-with-panache, living completely off-the-grid on a remote Canadian island. She can often be found shovelling the manure from one her daughter's three horses, fermenting batches of raw sauerkraut, brewing fresh kombucha, or harvesting kale from her garden!
WALKING
eARThist STATEMENT:
Pacing the/a
Pedestrian Performance of Place:
The Poiesis of Off-the-Grid
Walking cARTography
Bronwyn
Preece
Performing the/a Pedestrian
Performance of Place is a series of walking
‘performances,’ which seeks to
find-by-footfalls what constitutes or
qualifies as an (ecological) performative act within the remote, rural,
off-the-grid island community of Lasqueti, British Columbia, Canada. How might the parameters of performance differ in this context than
from an urban set of interactions labeled the same; where site-specificity
takes on a whole new breadth of meaning when and where there are no theatres to
step outside from, demanding performance to look at place as an
all-encompassing theatron?
This ongoing project asks: where and how do the edges of performance,
ecology, space, place, pace, art, life blur and/or are made distinct in this
geographically-contained and remote context?
Can walking be considered an embodied and performative verbing of temporality?
How does a proverbial ‘walk in the woods’
(which in this specific case, is a graveled ‘walk down Main Road’) inform
perceptions as/through/with the temporal factors of local seasonal change, as
‘one’ travels the length the 24 km (15 mile) island by foot …and how are our
perspectives of place communicated by people of different ages? And…truly, ultimately…is a walk, or can a
walk, be considered a performance? Or
must it be delineated as such, called as much, to be considered such; and how
requisite do the distinctions of ‘walking in’ or ‘walking as’ performance
relate to a general sense of accessible, unfolding performativity (the praxis
and poiesis) of the everyday?
Walk
locally, perform globally.
The notion of ‘global’ performance
that was the genesis of this project. I have become fascinated by the
intricacies and considerations of what the bounds of a collective ecology might
be and how might we approach them through performance. And so, based on an entirely off-the-grid
island, off the west coast of Canada, in the Coastal Douglas Fir ecosystem -- in
an attempt to relate performance to my rural setting -- and believing that
performance is not exclusive and should be, or rather is, accessible to all (at
all times) -- I initiated this project: a series of embodied monthly cartographic
walks. Begun as a mother/daughter duet
and then broadened, encompassing other members of the community, the project
involves walking the length of the island stopping at half-hour intervals, at
which time the specificity this place
is documented by each person in a series of three photographs and three lines
of poetry which are then assembled into a video…all aspects of this process
create and embody a cartographic and collective performance.
The
notion of cartography: the creation of maps, based on grid patterns, is an
intentionally played upon concept, in this off-the-grid context. Focusing on
the ‘art’ embedded in the word cartography, while aligning with its etymology
to ‘write on a piece of paper’, this project would approach place through
poetry. Heidegger
believes that “poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of Being. This topology tells Being the whereabouts of
its actual presence” (Poetry, Language,
Thought, 12). This project equally,
seeks to reveal a site-specific, site-sensuous and site-sensitive ‘topography’
of being and Being, of place; if not
maybe, more accurately a sole-specific, sensuous, and definitely sole-sensitive
one.
Walking and
writing alongside community members, all non-identified performers, I wondered
whether the use of language, namely the written and objective-laden English
language, would be employed in a way that overcame dualist binaries between
‘self’ and ‘environment’ or would it further entrench them? David Abram remarks that:
Our task, rather, is that of taking up the
written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing
language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly
intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things
themselves – to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches. It
is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local
soundscape…Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting
language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and
leaf (Spell of the Sensuous, 274).
‘Landmarks’ were
and are newly formed through the process, by the abstraction, yet indelibly
concrete sounding of a timed buzzer, halting steps every half hour: creating a
structure, yielding an intensity of focus on the here and now, of the immediacy
of this space and place. The timed
stops insert themselves in the space-place continuum, defining a fleeting and
temporal gaze.
Pacing the/a Pedestrian Performance of Place
on Lasqueti Island has succeeded in creating a temporal legacy of place, ever
shifting with season and direction – from the alternating North or South route
beginnings, from every observed bud through blossom, from the choice of clothes
we wear reflecting season and temperament, from the writing and walking process
of generating what has become a ‘deep map:’ a recording and the representation
“the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations”
(Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology,
64-65).
For me, the project was
most definitely a series of performances – albeit, an extended and refreshing
take on the traditional constructs of humanist-centered performance –through
process raising questions, including an examination of our notions of what
qualifies an audience. I was seen by ravens, by pinesiskins, by lambs, by
frogs. My appearance was registered,
evidently altered their movements, stopped or started their calls, triggered
adjustments in proximity and mutual decisions on how to proceed. We audienced each other, together. It was equally performative, in that sense of
being an unfolding process of reciprocal identification and identity with and
within our world – and an embodiment of temporality -- staged through the act
of poetic performance place-making….
Shared here in these video montages…..
THANK YOU,
Comments and Responses Most Welcome!
Bronwyn Preece, Walking eARThist
improvise@bronwynpreece.com / www.bronwynpreece.com
Website www.bronwynpreece.com
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#20 - Carol Kenna
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#21 - Caitriona Dunnett - Mass Paths
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| Caherdaniel Mass Path |
Originally the location of these tracks were confidently past on my word of mouth. Over 300 years of land exchange, has damaged this oral tradition. Many of these paths were not recorded and have been lost.
My photographs are an effort to preserve the traces of the faithful.
The work in this series explores historical photographic processes by marrying digital technology with nineteenth century methods to produce handcrafted images.
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| Connolly Mass Path |
Sheeps Head Mass Path, Connolly Mass Path and Caherdaniel Mass Path are tea-toned cyanotypes made from digital negatives.
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| Sheeps Head Mass Path |
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