The art of walking - two rambles about London

Here are my top tips for creative walking enthusiasts in London. Both have a foot in the art gallery and a foot firmly outside.

Although I have probably seen before the majority of Richard Long's work that is currently on show in major retrospective 'Heaven and Earth', I found its expansion into the large spaces of Tate Britain unexpectedly moving. Perhaps it was the humbling effect of a walk through a life dedicated to using his body, the land, the rhythms of sun, moon, tide, walking and resting as his art. Or perhaps it was the chime with my own solitary walks that moved me, I'm not sure.

The show is fascinating for revealing the evolution of ways he has represented his walking art in a gallery space - 'the knowledge of my actions, in whatever form, is the art.' (I find his gallery-specific pieces much less engaging and appealing.) His walks, which first began just as the first human steps were taken on the moon, were first communicated as photographs; later as a line on a map; and then a series of words capturing a narrative of discovery along a route. His work is conceptual to some extent but, at least for me, totally translatable into a sense of interaction with place. Also see Robert Macfarlane's excellent article on Long for the Guardian.

Second top tip: the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery which celebrates the democratisation of art and doesn't charge for entry, has an almost hidden gem, in addition to its less hidden ones. A tiny white card next to a pile of books in the lobby alerted me to a site-specific audio walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures-Miller devised in 1999.

Borrow an MP3 player from the reception to be guided by the compelling voice of Janet Cardiff into a physical journey around the lanes and alleys of the East End. The world you find yourself in between headphones, and between real walls is a curious mixture created by binaural sound recording and the real sounds of the places you share with Cardiff. A narrative begins to emerge about a woman with red hair, running from something.

I was never quite sure whether the overheard conversations happened in her time or in my own. She has an acute way of predicting one's own observations. There's a wonderful moment where you are guided into a church to sit in its cool and quiet. As the doors bashed behind me, for real, and on the headphones, I was struck by a smell of incense 'Mmm, smells like incense', said the intimate voice in my ear. When I took off the headphones to walk back to the gallery, I found myself highly attuned to the peculiar qualities and possible meanings of what I heard and saw.

I listened to many of Cardiff's audio walks on her website when I tutored workshops related to the Fruitmarket Edinburgh's exhibition of her work last year, but this was my first opportunity to experience the richness and mystery of walking real spaces with her, and the powerful suggestiveness of two sets of sound.

Highly recommended!

how to make an audio walk

Last Sunday I finished co-tutoring a workshop for the Fruitmarket Gallery with sound designer, Jules Rawlinson - three sessions to develop an intimate narrative focused on a walk around Edinburgh's old town which creates interest whilst also being open-ended. We were using Janet Cardiff's audio walks as our inspiring starting point, and like her, using binaural sound. There was a lot to learn - how to use sound recording equipment and edit the results, how to combine voice, image and captured sound to develop different textures and suggest narrative, and the whole sensitivity to what's dictated by the physical spaces we passed through. Robert Louis Stevenson provided us with some resonances with his descriptions of the decaying splendour of the old town in his day, describing it as a 'huge old human beehive', 'a black labyrinth', the great cliffs of houses piling up and up so that 'the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction'.

One thing I found interesting was how quickly a narrative developed out of observations of the places we went to. The cool dark enclosure of the little-visited Advocate's Close slowed our pace after the public hub-bub, buskers, and walking tours of the High Street. A small garden amongst scaffolding and graffiti suggested the magical beneath the mundane and began to imply a character who had tended it and had perhaps sat in that abandoned, broken chair. But then the close itself, its broken windows, urine stench and Buckfast empties, started to tell another story, suggest a threat, and so the pace increased again, towards an exit.

The resulting sound piece is quite rough and raw as you might expect from several of us working together under pressure of time and at our own pace of learning, but if you'd like to listen, it can be downloaded from Jules Rawlinson's website listed as 'audio walk' (use headphones).

Street Haunting

image from 'urban tapestries' - a research project by Proboscis

I turn from the Alps now to the old town of Edinburgh. I have wondered if being the daughter of a great Victorian alpinist helped make Virginia Woolf a writer. Presumably walking was part of family life, and might have got her observing, speculating at the people and places she saw, thus allowing her imagination to roam beyond her feet. In her 1927 essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure, it is clear that her aimless walks in the urban environment, the anonymity of walking amongst strangers, was her great adventure. ‘How could I think mountains and climbing romantic?’ she once said. ‘Wasn’t I brought up with alpenstocks in my nursery, and a raised map of the Alps showing every peak my father had climbed? Of course London and the marshes are the places I like best.’

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff is another ‘street-haunter’ and her audio walks are eerie evocations based on observations in real places laced with teasing fragments of narrative and memory. Cardiff uses binaural recording techniques that envelop you in sound - a sudden whisper in your ear, or the distant sound of feet running ahead. Her beguiling voice leads you – intimate and authoritative - and has you collaborating, as you walk, in reconstructing the ‘story’. Her installations with George Bures Miller, exhibiting at the Fruitmarket Gallery until the end of September use sound and narrative in a similar way, but it is the walks that myself and sound artist Jules Rawlinson will focus on as starting point for the workshop we’re leading for the next two Saturdays.

One of our principal resources for the workshop is the immediate area of the old town around the Fruitmarket (and of course the legs of our participants to move them around it with sound recorders). Three levels nest one above the other over the same coordinate – North Bridge, Market Street, and the esplanade of Waverley Station. Dark and shade. Underland and overland. Parallel worlds associated to different journey-purposes. The odd geography is linked by dark passages and stairways, rich in suggestion, and in sound. They are liminal places where you might pass from one imagined state to another.

In Woolf’s essay she sees streams of walking commuters as if they’re wrapped in some narcotic dream, imagining themselves to be great cricketers or famous actresses before the enchantment is broken by being ‘slung in long rattling trains’ and embraced once again in the conforming influence of their homes. I commuted for five years between Stirling and Edinburgh, walking from Waverley station for five minutes to an old town office, losing the hooted train announcements for the sound of tyres on cobbles, and the echo of a dark passage before the clang of the bell on the office door as I opened it, arriving into my non-dream, office self.

The possibilities for my own work in this environment are exciting, having spent so much time walking the rural. The anonymity of walking amongst strangers and finding mystery in every face has long fuelled my short fiction writing. But I’m also curious about the forms in which we leave marks and traces as we move in criss-cross pathways about a city, in an environment of stone and tarmac which refuses to take impressions. There are many avenues. The real and the imagined; the line of a walk coupled to a non-linear story; or as Rebecca Solnit puts it, 'the magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany'.