04/03/2014

The Walking Encyclopaedia's Walking Artists of the Day - Clare Qualmann (Walk Walk Walk), Dave Haden, David Bethell and Stuart Mcadam ( Deveron Arts)


























In a continuing series throughout the duration of The Walking Encyclopaedia, we'll be highlighting, daily, the works of four 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.

#29 - Clare Qualmann - Various
The work stems from an obsession with the ordinary and the unnoticed, looking for beauty in the everyday mundane. Collecting and collating words, images and artefacts forms the basis for sculptural and installation works. These are long-term ongoing projects that dictate their own form, or have no fixed form, shifting as they develop so that they might never be resolved in one finished piece. Everyday materials accessible materials like paper and thread, found fabrics, ephemera, form the core of my making - combined with existing objects, photography and drawing. The focus is on my own familiar, the urban environment that I inhabit. Domesticity is a recurring theme; examining the repetitions and routine of the quotidian. I relish the development of arcane skills, committing hundreds of hours of work to an object or an idea.

Walk - walking as a necessity, routine walks, getting places without spending any money, walking as a freedom, as a subversive practice, and as a visual art practice. As a member of walkwalkwalk I have become a walking artist, exploring and developing a practice that begins with a re-examination of the places that you think are familiar - a kind of anti-derive. Walks become live art events, site specific performances and research method for developing text, installation, film, audio and performance works. walkwalkwalk are founding members of the walking artists network





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#30 - Dave Haden 


thinking|walking: a selected bibliography of walking books

David Haden, November 2013.

Joseph A. Amato.  On Foot: A History of Walking.  New York University Press, 2004.

Alfred Barron, Foot Notes or Walking as a Fine Art. Wallingford, 1875  [Free on Archive.org in PDF and for ereader devices]

Francesco Careri.  Walkscapes: walking as an aesthetic practice (Land & Scape).  Gustavo Gili, 2001.

Michel De Certeau (trans. by Steven Rendall).  ‘Walking in the City’, in The Practice of Everyday Life.  University of California Press, 2006.

Merlin Coverley.  Psychogeography.  (2nd Ed.). Pocket Essentials, 2010.

Christopher Dewdney.  Acquainted with the night: excursions through the world after dark.  Harper Collins, 2005.

Stephen Graham.  The Gentle Art of Tramping.  Ernest Benn, 1926.  [Classic, though sadly not in the public domain. Has a modern reprint from Budge Books, 2007]

Tim Ingold.  Ways of Walking: ethnography and practice on foot (Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception series).  Ashgate, 2008.

Arthur Machen.  The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering.  Martin Secker, 1924.  [A touchstone text of British psychogeography]

Edwin Valentine Mitchell, ed.  The Art of Walking.  Loring & Mussey, 1934.

Geoff Nicholson.  The Lost Art of Walking: the history, science, philosophy, literature, theory And practice of pedestrianism.  Harbour Books, 2010.

Bryan D. Palmer.  Cultures of Darkness : night travels in the histories of transgression.  Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Karen O’Rourke.  Walking and Mapping: artists as cartographers (Leonardo Book Series).  MIT Press, 2013.
Jeffrey C. Robinson.  The Walk: notes on a Romantic image (Dalkey Archive Scholarly series).  Dalkey Archive Press, 2007.

Kerry Segrave.  America on Foot: walking and pedestrianism in the 20th century.  McFarland & Co., 2006.

Rebecca Solnit. Wanderlust: a history of walking.  Verso Books, 2006.


John Stilgoe.  Outside Lies Magic: regaining history and awareness in everyday places.  Walker, 1998.

Dave Haden is  an artist, writer, researcher & photo-journalist and a university lecturer at Birmingham City University's BIAD. Haden runs Stoke-on-Trent's most popular online arts resource and hub - Creative Stoke.

Website - http://www.creativestoke.org.uk/index.html 

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#31 - David Bethell - Road Roller




 The film is a performance and site specific piece of work that explores agricultural machines and the failure to live up to its own constructed expectations. The film depicts a poorly constructed Road Roller that made based around the horse and cart design of the 18th Century. Only this time the horse is portrayed by the artist, making him undertake the struggles of the journey that lies ahead. The make shift machine is dragged through a landscape, until it falls apart. Breaking bit by bit until the artists can no long continue. The viewer becomes attached to the machine its struggles, and a sense of loss is felt once it falls apart. The work looks at the loss of labour intensive jobs and the downturn in quality of products. Ironically agricultural machines were the catalyst for the growth of technology. The work is also celebrating where the artist is from, as the journey undertakes a popular walk on a public footpath from Ipstones to Foxt, a 2mile walk in total. The work therefore also hints at the possibility of a changing landscape and what is to come, at first a line, then a sodden path, a rocky path and then a road. This showing the impact on the landscape through man.


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#32 - Deveron Arts - featuring Lines Lost by Stuart Mcadam


Stuart McAdam

Lines Lost

First, the industry must be of a size and pattern suited to modern conditions and prospects. In particular, the railway system must be modeled to meet current needs.
Harold Macmillan
A project tracing the routes of branch lines cut in the Beeching Report
Stuart McAdam came to Huntly in Summer 2013 from Glasgow.
Stuart's Lines Lost project was triggered by the infamous railway cuts which saw train tracks closed as a result of Dr. Richard Beeching's recommendations 50 years ago. Through a series of performative walks with all kind of people along the former Portsoy to Huntly route, McAdams aim was to bring into focus the historic and contemporary concerns surrounding our transport legacy.
Through walking the former track again and again, people will see him reawaken the route that has been subsumed into the landscape - like remains of ghostly traces of the line that once linked communities. Linking natural with industrial and social history of the past 50 years he interrogated the historical, cultural and contemporary resonances through a series of documented walks.
The North of Scotland was one of the areas most affected by the Beeching cuts with local stopping train routes such as Aberdeen - Inverurie, Aberdeen - Keith - Elgin, Huntly to Banff and Portsoy, Banff - Tillynaught, Fraserburgh - St Combs, Elgin - Lossimouth, Aberdeen - Ballater and Fraserburgh, Maud - Peterhead and Aviemore - Elgin via Inverness, cut. Many of those that crossed the county have never been replaced by other forms of public transport making journeys difficult and adding hours to travel time for those not having access to private cars - passengers have to travel south to Aberdeen or north to Elgin to get connections often having long waits between buses. This summer McAdam aims to walk as many of these routes as possible starting with the those from Huntly to Banff and Portsoy.
 "Physical and transparent remnants of most of the lines still exist within the landscape and I hope to reawaken them the public consciousness", says McAdam, who has explored journeys, boundaries and slow travel in a range of artworks.
"As we mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Beeching report is also fitting time to consider the impact that the cuts had on the relative development and decline of the many towns and villages that lay along the historic routes, routes that were often life lines for outlying communities."


Deveron Arts is a contemporary arts organisation based in Huntly, a market town in the north east of Scotland with a population of 4,500. We work here with the history, context and identity of the town.
Deveron Arts has no gallery - instead the town is the venue - acting as studio, gallery and stage for artists of all disciplines invited from around the world to live and work here. For this we use found spaces throughout the town and its surrounding areas: supermarkets, churches, garages etc. to name just a few.

Engaging with local people and the community through topics of both local and global concern, Deveron Arts works through a 50/50 approach. This brings together artistic and social relationships in a global network that extends throughout and beyond the geographic boundaries of Huntly.

websites
http://www.deveron-arts.com/
http://www.deveron-arts.com/stuart-mcadam/

Since inception, Deveron Arts have worked with, among others - 
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