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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TREE MUSEUM – tree as monument

TREE AS MONUMENT is a temporary (inflatable) MUSEUM all about the TREE.

Above: 40m high Cyprus Tree on the LORNE foreshore, part of the sculpture trail LSB 2018.

Bio security at the door, magnifying glasses on request aiding you to get up close and personal with this OLD beautiful pine. Maybe for some the first time they really stopped and looked at a tree as for many it blends in with the rest of the woods. So I ask, do we take trees for granted?

Spending time inside, takes you on a journey

what is it you SEE?

Above: Night time in the museum

LANDscanning the YARRA LINE

Above: ‘What’s Left’ LANDscan residue along Parramater Road Sydney, 2017

LANDscanning: is the secondary sequence and residue capture while WALK-ing between trees asking the YARRA line, mapping, this is a personal and public performance, visible and invisible.

Walking leaves little traces, little is left behind after the experience except tracks of thoughts so the idea of simple photographs or drawings during such a walk is clearly not enough: an object cannot compete with an experience.  This is why this subjective experience uses the process of the LANDscanning.

LANDscanning collects the experience of the walk, the tactile meeting of the tree as a sensuous engagement, collecting the mirco residue of the past of all types of engagement: the fallen leaves, the dying flowers, the scared bark of graffiti and even when you think you have left nothing!! LANDscanning captures this engagement to become a visually true semiotic reading of place.

LANDscans are captured using a hand held scanner, an instrument that has become an extension of myself, as a natural and familiar process. Just like extending your hand to touch and engage with the rich textures of a new environment, in this case, I can scan. So when my hand moves over these vastly different surfaces, my scanner effortlessly records this engagement, even my staggered movements or my digital dirt as I call it are permanently stored as textural memories of the engagement of place. The images captured are created by factors both intentional and unintentional which are strongly influenced by the moment of capture, discreet segments of place, points in time, samples of the surrounding environment which later revealed layered records of the impact of occupation, motion and time. 

Every interaction leaves its mark including my own LANDscans captures the stuff we overlook.

Above: Scans of organic residue, while walking in Sydney 2017

Above: Scans of man-made items / residue while walking, Sydney 2017

 

BILLYcan Project

Above: the BILLYcan with weighted pen suspended over paper and with examples of drawings of individual walks, Ashfield residency  2016/17

I carry a ‘BILLYcan’ a very simple and accessible device that collects the data of my movements. How? Well, inside the BILLYcan is a weighted pen over paper which records the simplest of movements, even moments of stillness – this simple process captures poetic drawings that are kinetically achieved by the agency of walking. 

Art made by WALK-ing is a visualization and awareness of space, landscape and situation. 

Walking with intent M.A.D.E. Walking opens a platform for contemporary practices that blend experimental geography, site-specific art, spatial agency and rural/urban activism. As a common journey they act as a trigger for exchange, research and performance, whereby walkers/participants navigate between the local and the global, between past, present and future, between urban and rural, between self and community. Walking a myriad of pathways sparks awareness of the infrastructures and blueprints that shape our societies.

Moreover, by putting a mundane activity as walking at the centre of our experiences, artists, audiences and other practitioners dissolve into each other. The common walking experience produces different forms of collective action and spatial engagement, blurring boundaries of engagement of a community.

If we look at this scientifically, walking 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 as they see things anew. Which is very much one of the driving concepts behind the participatory walks. However we must not forget the imagery created by the walks along well-beaten routes and paths. Patterns emerging of repeated movements never revealed before and it slows people down to notice their environment, they reflect on the algorithm translating route and rut into art. These walks dramatically change our relationship with the landscape, leading to better care and maintenance of that landscape. M.A.D.E. Walking puts the respective city on the map creating a unique soulful experience of where you are in the world.

Walking with intent M.A.D.E. Walking changes the face of hardcore exercise and makes it a creative pursuit  – with fitness on the side. 

Above: Close up of M.A.D.E. Walking of the feature image, made during a 5klm walk along LORNE’s foreshore. Generative Art M.A.D.E Walking while engagement and activation of place.

A memento of your engagement and actual experience of place during a leisurely walk

 

M.A.D.E Walking, while running

THE WORLD IS FULL OF PATTERNS