The inspirational prompt from WTL team:

Our walk will again have as a focus ideas around ‘Place’ – this time, how we know, recognise and respond to it.  It’s highly likely our concept of ‘place’ can be seen to be both fluid and deeply rooted. Below are quotes that go some way individuals try to explain that awareness:

“We lack – we need – a term for those places where one experiences a ‘transition’ from a known landscape … into ‘another world’: somewhere we feel and think significantly differently. They exist even in familiar landscapes: there when you cross a certain watershed, recline or snowline, or enter rain, storm or mist. Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographics, leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within counties.”

Robert Macfarlane

“Place is always the first thing I connect with – rather than the music or the imagery – when I travel; I am always trying to understand what a place is, and what does it mean to the people that live here? What are its layers of history? How has it changed? How might it change?”

Julian Hoffman

We invite you to search your own thoughts on what goes to make a place special for you. Try to explain exactly what it may be about the place that influenced your response. This could be through any visual media, through sound or words…wherever it takes you.

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Destination – Garden Cliff, Westbury on Severn Gloucestershire. Duration 2 hours

Circle Walking

changing my approach to Garden Cliff

led me to arrive from a different direction

to surprise myself

I passed a circle of trees I’d never noticed before

because when walking the other way I didn’t look left

I habitually turned right to see the huge oak tree

in the grounds of Westbury Gardens

further along I passed tree I knew well, in it’s hey day

I did my first circular walk around it

but it has fallen, rotting on the ground

pre-pandemic I rarely saw anyone at Garden Cliff

sometimes at sunset young couples in pairs may be spotted,

wrapped closely in each others arms, gazing

or elderly pairs in cars, staring,

parted by a gear stick and forty years

• 

• 

jackdaws mate for life

every morning I watch two pigeons

bobbing along the fence-top together 

on my way I saw several families

I hoped to find quiet solitude at the beach under the cliff

to gaze, stare, draw, film and walk in circles

Pleased to find myself alone

I unpacked materials and equipment

taking care not to let things fall into the mud

I set up my camera but, just as I was about to shoot

two children clambered over the rocks shouting 

they too had arrived to have an adventure

I carried on, hoping that my strange behaviour might scare them away

send them running home to their parents

and tell them there was a mad woman walking in circles

their parents would think they were making it up

So I carried on, recording the sounds of loud splashes

when they hurled rocks into the river

I took photos and prepared to take mud prints

when a familiar creature came bounding onto the beach

Django, a friend’s dog, followed by her, her Dad and two kids

operations were abandoned 

The place transformed from one of solitude 

to a social space, it was good to see them

two more people came into view

waving – to me, to Sarah? Her Dad?

I waved back to Eleanor and Russell, some friends from Dorset!

change allows for the unexpected to happen

the beach had transitioned

from uninhabited to occupied

had it had been a car park, the sign would flash FULL

My Walking the Land mission

was complete

the place I know so well, had become unrecognisable

an enjoyable interlude

from solitude

with people that share my love 

of the Severn

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Post walk notes……

The morning of the Walking the Land event, I had given a talk for art.earth about my practice In which I had referred to transitioning from 180 degree drawings to 360 degree filming.

I remember my degree thesis was about circles

My final work for my MA included a mirror tunnel that transformed film footage into a big globe

I walk in circles quite often

When I drive places I like to go in one direction and return in another

The weekend after the walk, I participated in a Drawing Breath workshop

We blew bubbles with ink onto paper

I’ve recently been making circular monoprints

Meditation breathing is circular, as are the tides

We also drew from memory, then erased, and re-drew, repeatedly, without having the object in view

I’ve been blowing bubbles on printing blocks

And drawing a large circular work

Round and round we go