- Location
HERE AND THERE, by MARK PATTERSON
Adele Prince – Meander Map
ONE OF the great lies, up there with "the cheque's in the post" is "the world is a small place".
It isn't; it's huge physically and culturally, but perceptions of distance alter according to time and mode of travel. The world can seem a smaller place than it used to be for someone who, for example, spends a lot of their time flying between international airports in 747s. The world is also smaller when we drive through it, or rather past it, in cars. But try walking those same distances. Suddenly, the world is a dauntingly large place – and, in a sense, because we walk less than our ancestors, the world is actually bigger than it used to be.
Most of us would baulk at the idea of walking from Nottingham to Southwell, and back, in a day. That's 24 miles, and it's a long way. Yet Roman soldiers were trained to walk 25 miles a day, over any terrain, and in their sandals. Our forbears, one feels, had a different, and more realistic perspective, on physical distance when travel was dictated by the miles a person could walk, or ride, in daylight hours.
How far would you get if you walked around Nottingham for eight hours in a single day?
Actually, Adele Prince knows the answer, because she's just done exactly that – tramped around Nottingham, starting at Midland Railway Station, guided by the directions and suggestions of strangers she met on the way.
Is she homeless? No, people, this is contemporary art. As a counterpart to Simon Schama's Power of Art TV series, the BBC and the Arts Council commissioned ten artists to create a "tour that explored and documented the cultural power of a chosen UK city". Prince's city was Nottingham and her project was the creation of an online "meander map" based on her eight-hour trek around the city. The idea was to go in completely random directions, the route dictated by suggestions made by people she met on the way, and text messages sent to her GPS-equipped mobile phone (most of which were sent by people she already knew). Everybody who made route suggestions was also photographed, and have had their images pasted up on the project website.
Prince's walkathon was, for her, a kind of counterpoint to a related project she did last year, when she ran, in four days, the 90-odd miles between Nottingham and Skegness. She took a photograph every five minutes, later editing the images up into a film. Both it and the "meander map" project were about physically mapping different kinds of cultural space – one a route known to innumerable Nottingham holiday-makers, the other the streets of Nottingham, populated by ordinary people with all their (our) hopes and dreams. At the same time, Prince's trek was about emphasising the importance of your locality (where there's as much real life as in any "exotic" locale) about physically bringing contemporary art to the real streets of real cities.
"I like the idea of getting people interested in contemporary art who wouldn't usually go to a gallery," says Prince, speaking from her home in north London. Strangely, despite her own location down south, the meander map was her fourth Nottingham-linked project. The first was her contribution to Day-to-Day Data at Angel Row Gallery, the data and fact-orientated show curated by Nottingham's Ellie Harrison, an artist with whom Prince has some affinity in that both are interested in the seemingly trivial and brushed over minutiae of everyday life. For Day to Day Data, Prince's project was the making of a map locating all the "lost" shopping trolleys she could find in the city. Following that, she was asked to create some art for Angel Row's window space. Then came the Nottingham-Skegness run. What's her thing about Nottingham?
"I don't really have a connection with Nottingham! I just keep ending up working there," she says. "I'm as baffled as you are."
Where did she end up on her eight-hour walk?
The first person she asked for directions was a taxi driver at Midland Station. He sent her to the Castle. Then she was sent to the Old Trip to Jerusalem. Then to The Park… and so on. Sometimes, a text message would arrive directing her to a particular post box, or to "a green door, then turn left". She ended up back in the city centre. "I got a text message saying ‘go to the bookies'. So I went to the bookies, where I was told to go to the lingerie department of Debenhams, and say hello to the girls there. And that was the finish."
Walk finished, the meander map is viewable online (you can see it at http://www.sportsdo.net/events/meandernottingham.aspx) as are the photographs of all the people who gave directions (http://www.sportsdo.net/Photos.aspx?sid�).
The Nottingham-Skegness run was a precise and linear project. By contrast, Prince wanted her Nottingham walk to be the opposite in tone, dictated by fate and somewhat chaotic. She found what she was looking for and left us with the salutary lesson that, for meeting new people and seeing new things, there's nothing like a good long walk. It's good for you, you know.
MARK PATTERSON
