LOCKED-Down M.A.D.E Walking

Initially when Covid first started I came down with the Flu, I couldn’t get tested because I didn’t meet the criteria. Who could sure, so I isolated myself and stayed home for the next 14 days teaching and the next 14 days preparing term 2 teaching as an online program ready for schools return.

During this time I couldn’t walk far, for long or intensely and ran out of paper so I started to cut up and use old brochures, magazine and disused books to draw on. I kept the Billycan close and moved it as I moved…

I documented the paper before I used it to draw on and then after for 28 days before returning to teach on campus. Except the first day as I was so anxious of the entire situation the world was no in and how it made me feel was completely reflected in the first drawing. From a plumbing brochure of a woman washing her hands, after the drawing it seemed they were bleeding from all the washing.

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The image taken in the can

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Places I couldn’t go

The Maroochy River Golf Course brochure

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Festivals that weren’t going to happen

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Day 21

Forgot this day to document the initial image from the Horizon Festival Program.

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The Refinery Program brochure for its images of meeting places, people and happy gatherings

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Day 28

Forgot to take an image of the day before returning to the school campus

BILLYCAN PROJECT M.A.D.E Walking in Dalby

Dalby Billycan Project is an ALL age and ability activity, it works when you’re moving, skipping, slow walking, line dancing, shuffling, from a wheel chair and even moments of stillness creates a ‘SELFIE’ drawing. Each individual carries while walking/moving, a ‘Billycan’! Yes the iconic Australian boil a BILLYCAN – can, is especially kitted out to become a drawing machine. HOW? Inside there is a weighted pen suspended over paper that records the simplest of movements, even moments of stillness, capturing your swagger, your own personal drawing of how you move within the world creating a drawing as unique as your finger print. 

Artistically speaking this process is a cataloguing of impressions as cartographical, narratives of direct marks resulting from sequenced events that  is your experience of walking in the landscape. 

Thanks to this method of creating, the drawing is an artwork which emulsifies location and experience together into an inextricable whole. It also records a period of time, personal exertion that produces a narrative conveying physically the drawings relationship with them, who they are and how they move. 

These seemingly symmetrical but uneven drawings cannot be separated from the walk, the travel, the effort of self. Encouraging the community to engage in their own landscape to create drawings of their everyday in Dalby.

Now, scientifically, walking/moving increases the size of the brain regions linked to planning and memory and enhances creativity. From walking Walkers come away from the experience with an altered perception of place, having created a subjective map, people see things anew notice and reflect on their own algorithms which translates into art and strengthens their relationship with where they are in the world. A wondrous mind and body connection.

Dalby Billycan Project challenged the face of standard exercise and makes it a gentle creative pursuit  – with wellness on the side. ‘My challenge everyday now is not the calories I lose or how far I walk but the drawing I create today, and how to better it tomorrow.’ Annette Wegg

Hold the CAN

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A day out Walking in Dalby

Walking is immersive!

M.A.D.E Walking is Many Adventures Directly Experienced. It undoes the static, singular viewpoint upon a landscape; rather, the walker’s experience emphasises the embodied and temporal aspects of perceiving. Walking functions as an agent to connect people with place, it personalises engagement therefore to record this unique activity on paper is a beautiful and poetic symbiotic relationship with self and place creating a physical memento of the journey. 

This journey personifies the human experience of landscape as an experience of a body in motion in an environment that doesn’t stand still. In contemporary landscape art, this doubly mutable relationship of person to place is often made evident. Drawing and walking are usefully enlisted to highlight that mutability. Giving these drawings temporal extension because they make them part of a series of events that of being in the world, in that moment in time.

M.A.D.E Walking drawings are like signatures each drawing reveals the different qualities and characteristics of each person and how they move through the world which is as unique as an individuals fingerprint. We engage with this drawing as a narrative as we gather a sense of the drawing, following the lines with our eyes that have been laid down by its construction, so that the time of making is overlaid with the time of viewing. A network of accumulated traces left by your own movements, it is both sensory maps, inscribing a line of experiences, and story. Creating an embodied consciousness filled by the landscape.

The M.A.D.E Walking Billycan drawings are also a proto-linguistic object with social dimensions. This aspect of the work enables us to examine a shared language/experience (in this case, a circular drawing) of an individual while highlighting both physicality and codification as part of the workings of drawing as a language. Walking therefore immerses the ‘YOU’ in the landscape, not just in an observer’s role because it is imperative the walker has a connection between ground and foot. It is about the body in motion and through this artistic approach it communicates the experience of landscape, viewers are reminded, often via the enlisting of their own bodies, that both subjectivity and landscapes are active, flexible, and constructed. 

These are truely ‘selfie’ Drawings. 

Below: 39 days of walking, just in ‘Blue’

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M.A.D.E Walking: with intent

M.A.D.E Walking changes a persons experience of their everyday!

Thanks to this method of creating, the drawing is an artwork which emulsifies location and experience together into an inextricable whole. It records a period of time, our personal exertion with site, producing a narrative that conveys physically the drawings relationship with the walker, who they are and where they walk.
Taking a group of Artists for a walk within the LANDscape of which they will be developing a concept for a large commission.

Below: are the resulting generative drawings each unique to the artist/walker, their engagement of the place they’re walking and how they move through the world.

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