Hello my friends,
It’s that time of year, and I’d love to share a few things to explore at your leisure!
Amy walking and collecting in Ballarat East, Wadawurrung Country
This year, in amongst it all, I have been continuing to help build the national collective of kindred spirits that is the Australian Walking Artists (AWA). In our first year we have nurtured an online community with a monthly newsletter and catch ups with guest artist presentations and chats, and I love running the Instagram account and seeing all the amazing things people are up to at home and abroad, and all the connections and collaborations being born. In our first year, AWA has held its first exhibition, an artist retreat, and we have our very own book awaiting publication! Explore it all here
The next step is getting legit with organisational incorporation so that we can do more things. Stay tuned. And as always, we practice deep listening and learning as artists walking on stolen land.
As our friend Geert from Walk Listen Create writes on walking art in the 21st century:
“Today, the art of walking functions not only as a subject and practice but also as a tool for healing, fostering social change, and strengthening natural ecosystems.”
Check out the call out for next year’s Walking Art Encounters in Prespa Greece and also keep an eye out for plans hatching for a parallel happening in Australia.
In the meantime if you need to float away on waters and poetry of Northern Greece for a moment watch this we made there last year : )
My ongoing collaborative work with traditional owner Richard Collopy continues with producing the exciting Manna Gum Stories project. We’ve been working on Richard’s new website, a children’s book and digital stories that will all be launched at an exhibition in April next year at Apollo Bay Arts Inc. It is an honour to be part of bringing Gadubanud culture to the world, and advocating where I can on complex issues along the way.
Walking with Richard at Aire River
In my own creative work, I have been enjoying some low key creations, no hustle to produce, that connect to walking and noticing: recording audio chats with good humans (and a failed grant app for a cool collaborative podcast that could still become something!); making terrariums, tiny glass worlds of moss, rocks, mushrooms, treasures; having fun with photo collages from my wanders in city and country, melding colours, textures, tones. The below feature walks in Melbourne, Brisbane, Apollo Bay and Ballarat.
And I am doing a fun thing loosely called The Bowerbird Project where I collect something every day for a year and record a short journal entry from which I will create a kind of 3D collage of some sort at the end. I am enjoying exploratory things without set outcomes or expectations and learning as I go.
This idea of collecting and journaling over 365 days was inspired by Chris Drury’s 2001 work Mushroom Wheel: a mixed media work featuring 365 found objects one for each day of the year and hand written diary entries in radiating lines from a central mushroom spore. (Pictured here in the book Song of the Earth).
Chris Dury work Mushroom Wheel 2001
I love seeing other variations on this idea like the wonderful Vanessa Berry (fellow AWAer) and her book coming out next year titled Calendar where Vanessa says “I focus on everyday, retro, and memory objects, a year’s worth of interesting things, and I look forward to sharing it with you next year.”
I have also loved discovering artists like Rosalie Gascoigne and her great reminder that while we gather inspiration from around us and from each other, all creative expression is unique to the point that each person is unique. With respect, we can acknowledge these things whilst creating something new, from our own singular perspectives and in our own unique forms.
“You need never dry up, you need never dwindle, because life gives you some sort of adventure, happy or sad, all the time. That is what you have to plug into, the region where you live, and what you really know is in your bone marrow.” R.G
Photo collage with Minerva and Rosalie
Happy resting, reading and keeping up the good fight for peace and humanity. Watch the awesome Nan Goldin advocate for Palestine at her recent exhibition opening here.
& to close here are some books I read this year that you might like too:
Fiction
All Fours by Miranda July
Olive by Emma Gannon
The Bell of the World by Gregory Day
A Land of Stone and Thyme, an Anthology of Palestinian Short Stories eds Nur and Abdel Wahab Elmessiri
Sunbathing by Isobel Beech
Non-Fiction
Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration eds Cameo Dalley and Ashley Barnwell
Janet Lawrence, The Pharmacy of Plants by Prudence Gibson
Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape by Mel Gooding
Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Erosion, Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams
Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin
Motherlands: In Search of our Inherited Cities by Amaryllis Gacioppo
Wanderlust: a History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
Glass after Glass by Barbara Blackman
We are the stars by Gina Chick
Things that Helped, Essays by Jessica Freidman
The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel
Position Doubtful by Kim Mahood
Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah) by Tom Nicholson
To the Lake: a Balkan Journey of War and Peace by Kapka Kassabova
Rosalie Gascoigne by Kelly Gellatly (NGV)
Florine Stetheimer by Henry McBride (MoMA)
Fiona Hall, Force Field (MoCA)
Dime Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic
See you in the new year!
x
