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’