Walking Home is an idea, a dream if you will, what I am interested in is how dreams or concepts exist in reality. Does the dream fall apart for the viewer or the artist if the artist fails to walk all the way, if that path is broken by a train or a ferry.
For now I must be honest for I have had to take a train across some of France due to unpleasant swelling on my feet and a certain schedule to attempt to stick to. In the past two days I traversed the distance between Laon and Reims and am slowly discovering how to use my footsteps as a rhythm for my mind and the landscape before me as a canvas for my imagination. I am slowly devising ways of showing this thing to people after the fact.
Things I wish I had brought with me No.3 A Compass.
Good Afternoon,
Its wednesday and its raining, hopefully by this time on Sunday the sun will be out and I will have walked under the curve of the M25 and out into the Kent countryside in time to find a suitable spot for my first camp en route to St. Gallen.
This is an intimidating prospect.
Alongside all the art work issues there are piles of other things to be dealt with that I appear to have left to the last minute.
After I took down the show at Shed & a Half gallery I packaged all the elements from the show individually as a durational performance. The idea behind this process was that I would send all the bits of the show onto Switzerland via post and upon my arrival there I would unwrap them as the opening performance of a show in St. Gallen.
Unfortunately this has proved beyond me to arrange in time. The outcome of this is that at some point next year I will have a show in St. Gallen and the works that I wrapped at the end of the London show will remain wrapped until they are delivered to St. Gallen for exhibition there. This, as most unexpected outcomes are, is a rather enjoyable idea. The packages are now sealed within a taxidermy case that formed part of the exhibition and shall remain thus until they arrive in Switzerland. With the obvious possible outcome that they never come to Switzerland, in which case they will simply never be opened again and the piece will stand as an archive, a testament to a failure, or a change of course.
An attempted introduction.
In some ways this project started quite some time ago. I shall attempt to bring you up to speed now and apologise for not getting you involved earlier on in the process.
In 1982 I was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, some 8 months later, I left. In the next 5 years I lived in 5 different countries behind 5 different doors but at the end of the day, I grew up in South Wales, near Newport, but I wasn't Welsh. Nor was I Swiss.
As an artist I started the practice of walking in 2002. And somewhere during a performance on a train to Peterborough I imagined the idea of Walking Home. To my place of birth. To St. Gallen, Switzerland. Through an MA in Arts & Ecology I spent my time exploring my peripatetic intrigue and building up the foundations of a project that will very shortly see me set off from my Hackney residence for St. Gallen, Switzerland.
This project has seen me communicate with curators in London and St. Gallen, and create a body of work that is as extensive as it is eclectic.
