- Venue
- Hardwick Gallery
- Starts
- Monday, March 3, 2025
- Ends
- Thursday, March 27, 2025
- Address
- University of Gloucestershire, Hardwick Campus, St Paul's Road, Cheltenham, Glos. GL50 4BS
- Location
- South West England
- Organiser
- Hardwick Gallery and Walking the Land CIC
Line(s) of Enquiry is an exhibition and symposium developed by Hardwick Gallery and Walking the Land, a multi-disciplinary artists’ collective that has been walking and making art on the first Friday of every month since 2004. For the past 18 months, WtL has held a number of walks on the Honeybourne Line, a former railway track that is now a green corridor connecting communities in the north of Cheltenham, including Hardwick Campus, to the High Street and mainline station in the south.
This durational engagement has enabled a sustained dialogue with the greenway, looking beyond the track’s use and purpose to understand the Honeybourne Line through its ecologies: as topography, as habitat, as network, as archive, a carrier of histories, a living museum, as a place of movement, pause and transient encounters. By approaching each artist’s creative engagement as a layer in the mapping of the past, present and future of this (and other) public space(s), WtL extends the collective imaginary of the Honeybourne Line to, it is hoped, cultivate a deeper connection between people and environment.
Members of the group that live further afield in Stroud, Cirencester, Oxfordshire, Cardiff, Somerset and Edinburgh, have been invited to locate and engage with a linear route closer to home that resonates with the brief, in a form of linked study to bring another layer of research and contemplation to the project and will also feature as part of the exhibition and symposium.
To contextualise the exhibition within a wider field of practices, Walking the Land and Hardwick Gallery have coordinated a day-long symposium of discussions and workshops at the University of Gloucestershire (UoG). We will hear from WtL artists Janette Kerr, Ruth Broadbent, Valerie Coffin Price, Amanda Steer about their relationship to line, drawing and location. Jean Boyd, Dan Keech and Sarah Bowden will approach the exhibition as a thought experiment and discuss what the project initiates. After lunch and the opportunity to take part in a group walking/drawing session with our guest panellists and WtL artists, the final discussion between Clare Qualmann, Richard Keating, and Paul Wakelam will explore ideas around walking as a creative, collaborative practice.
Entry to the symposium is free, register through this page. The symposium has limited capacity – if you book and find you can no longer attend, please return to Eventbrite and cancel your ticket so that it can be released to someone else.
We hope some of you will be able to join us. There will be plenty of opportunity throughout the day to join in the discussions which we hope will offer a rich and vibrant experience to the day as well as serve as a potential catalyst for future collaborations and projects.
