Talking Walking

Andrew Stuck planned meeting up with Australian Kim Goldsmith sometime in advance, knowing that she would be returning from a residency on Skye with her partner and would only have a short time in London. They were staying in a hotel just south of Kings Cross, so Andrew met them there, with the intention of finding quiet spaces nearby in which to record an interview. Andrew accompanied Kim on a walk towards the Camley Street Nature reserve and Old Saint Pancras Churchyard, both of which he assumed would be quiet, calm spaces.

Kim is a sound recordist and a digital storyteller, and considers herself an environmental artist, like others, whom Andrew has recorded who have a practice in sound, it would seem inevitable that wherever they go sounds and noises intrude on their conversation. The interview with Kim was no exception, as you will discover.

The good news is that Kim took it in very good spirits! What could possibly go wrong? 22’58” 10.8 MB

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Andrew Stuck has travelled to Wolverhampton to meet Daniella Turbin, whose walking art practice includes drawing and photography, to talk about her year long project “A Place to Return To”. We take a walk for an hour beside a canal that runs from Wolverhampton to Stoke-on-Trent. For Daniella, this is just a short walk, as starting in May 2022 she began walking alone for 367 days through the whole of Britain on a route that touched every county and would link up with other walking artists, with the overall intention of finding out more about the country since the pandemic. 

Her year long adventure, apparently went without mishap, unlike their walk beside the canal. During their walk Andrew’s recorder stopped and they were unsure when it had stopped, so tried to remember what they may have already discussed. They passed through a group of men who were taking drugs and drinking alcohol and were overtaken by another man, wheeling a giant tractor tyre. Intrusive industrial sounds from the neighbouring warehouses interrupted their conversation but they were lucky as they occasionally entered tunnels in which the ambience changed significantly, and they were able to talk without raising their voices. 26’57” 12.6MB

Photo credit: Images from the exhibition by David Rowan

‘Women walking, The City, at Night’ is an initiative begun in the last three years by Eléonore Ozanne. She and Andrew Stuck are walking briskly on a grit-covered path that runs beside a lake in the resort town of Banyoles, 20 km north of Girona in Spain. They have only recently met as they are both attending a Walking Arts and Relational Geographies conference. 22’01” 10.3MB

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Andrew Stuck has agreed to meet adventurer Alastair Humphreys at Swanscombe station and walk with him towards the Thames estuary to talk about his new book “Local”. To be honest, Andrew has never been to Swanscombe station, and as he found out later, neither had Alastair.

It is an area of the estuary that is less well trodden. They certainly didn’t encounter many people on foot, however, Andrew was fairly confident that in Alastair’s company they wouldn’t get lost, as Alastair has walked the Empty Quarter, cycled round the world and rowed across the Atlantic. So surely a walk of a couple of miles to the river wouldn’t be their undoing?

21’57” 10.3MB

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Andrew Stuck is with Greek dramaturg, Anasthasia Polychronidou, at the Walking Art Encounter in Prespes, in western Macedonia and they are trying to keep out of the sun.  There is not a lot of shade, but they’ve discovered that if they walk in a circuit around the local chapel, at least two of the sides of the building offer them a little respite from the extreme heat. 

“The Shared and the Personal”, Anastasia’s recent work focuses on the socio-political aspects of performance, particularly for women artists, in public spaces in her native city of Thessaloniki. The interview opens with Andrew asking her, about what has brought her to Prespes. 21’54” 10.3MB

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Photo credits: Feature image – Andrew Stuck, Gallery centre – Yiannis Ziogas; Others – WAC23

Only since Covid has Tamsin Grainger discovered Walking art, but in that short time she’s made two Soundwalks, which have been shortlisted for the Sound Walk September Award and she has made many other works.

A Shiatsu practitioner, she bartered  treatments for home stays, on long-distance walks across Europe and became known on the Camino for helping with pulled muscles and tired legs. You can’t help but be inspired by the story she tells. 25’40” 12MB

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Andrew Stuck is with Mick Douglas, a self-confessed, long-distance solo hiker. He has worked as an artist researcher into creative practice at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, for three decades. Much of his work was around the interaction of people within modes of transport, comparing practices in cities in Australia to cities in India.

We are walking along the uneven shingle beach of the Great Prespa Lake in western Macedonia in north west Greece, as Mick has come to present a piece of work at the Walking Arts Encounters there. 

He’s here to talk about and demonstrate a piece he developed for an unusual festival in New Zealand in which he takes a solo hike for four days within a shipping container. If that’s not unusual enough, he goes on to tell Andrew how he is hosting and ghosting walks around a 40 acre block of land. He is developing an ecological practice in which he invites people to engage with their surroundings in part, listening to commentary that he’s created as a sound walk. 25’42’ 12MB

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Rachel Epp Buller is an inter-disciplinary artist based in Kansas in the United States. She is the recipient of two Fulbright scholarships, the latest of which she went to wintry Edmonton in north west Canada to make a piece of walking art called “One Hundred Days of Walking”. Her piece has now been shortlisted for the inaugural Marŝarto Award for Walking Art.

Andrew Stuck and Rachel talk over the Internet on a Zoom call about the importance to her of using different media to create work, including embroidery, bookmaking, and recording the sounds of the environment through which she walks.  They also discuss how she maintained her discipline throughout the 100 days by keeping to a ‘walking score’, and how she has exhibited the work.

The interview opens with Andrew asking Rachel to explain a little bit about the Fulbright scholarship programme. 18’11” 8.5MB

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Images from One Hundred Days of Walking, 2022, an installation of 100 accordion books, cotton, and vinyl (one full installation view and one detail).

Elena Biserna is an Italian researcher and curator who lives in Marseille. In 2022 she completed and published two compendia, one called “Going Out: walking, listening, sound making”, and the other “Walking with Scores”.

Andrew Stuck catches up with her over the Internet on a Zoom call. It is quite impossible to cover all the topics that she has written about, collated and published as her two books run to over 1000 pages, so he starts by encouraging her to explain from were and why walking art and sound walking in particular might have originated.

The majority of published walking art stems from the Anglo-Saxon world, so it is refreshing to talk to someone who clearly has identified and researched works from other areas, and in other languages, to bring a fresh perspective.

Her research has led her to develop her own walking art practice reinterpreting walking scores written by others with the project “Walking from Scores”. This has later led her to write some of her own scores with a feminist perspective in order to clearly address the specificities of gendered bodies walking in public space. 14.3MB 30’26”

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It’s a sunny summer’s day and Andrew Stuck is on the Waterlink Way, a green route for cyclists and pedestrians that follows the valley of the rivers, Ravensbourne, Pool and Quaggy, flowing south to north through the London Borough of Lewisham.

Andrew is in the company of Emma Jackson, an urban sociologist at Goldsmith’s, University of London and the Director of the Centre of Urban and Community Research, as she tells him about how she uses walking in her research and in teaching her students. They talk about the research centre and how she herself studied there, as well as what urban sociologists do in general, and specifically, when the pandemic restricted their explorations.

Emma is keen to impress on how every walk is different, even if you’re following a familiar route, as the Waterlink Way is to both of us.  As if to endorse what she is saying, something unusual does occur. 22’52” 10.7MB

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