From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff – 40 Years of Art Walking
A new exhibition tracing a journey through art inspired by travels on foot will open at PM Gallery this March. Walk On offers a previously unrecorded history of recent art practice, presenting a group of notable artists, each of whom creates work by making a journey on foot. The exhibition is a compelling depiction of the extent to which important art works over the past forty years have begun with the act of walking.
From land art and conceptual art, street photography and the essay film, walking has been central to the work of many artists, whether making their mark on the rural wilderness, documenting meaningful journeys or closely examining urban areas.
Artists such as Richard Long have crossed countries and continents to create works leaving traces of their movement on the land itself (the exhibition will feature Fourteen Stones, the first work made by Long specifically to be shown indoors). For many, the walk itself is the artwork, a type of performance over time, and anything that results from it is only evidence or documentation, shown as photography, writing or artefacts from their journeys.
Some artists, such as Bruce Nauman, have explored the infinite possibilities of walking, looking at how the ways in which we walk reveal who we are. Others have walked on historic sites; Marina Abramovic, for example, undertook an epic journey along the length of the Great Wall of China in a symbolic act of separating and then reuniting with her then collaborator Ulay, for her work The Lovers.
Tracing and mapping is a recurring theme throughout the exhibition: from Chris Drury’s weaving of maps of his walks in the mountainous region of Ladakh, India, to artists such as Plan B or Rachael Clewlow, who mark their steps with GPS devices in inventive ways, devising systems to record daily walks and so immortalising everyday routines. Clewlow’s OS Explorer notebooks, paintings and screen-prints, which feature in Walk On, are meticulously documented, colourful visual records of the routes and methods she takes to travel through her home city, Newcastle Upon Tyne.
In his films, photographs and drawings entitled Windwalks – Seven Walks from Seven Dials, Tim Knowles strolls about London, his route determined by the ways in which the wind whips through the streets. The exhibition will also include two video works by Francis Alÿs, Guards and the Nightwatch, part of the Seven Walks project commissioned by Artangel in 2004-5, both of which will be shown in Pitzhanger Manor itself.
The show takes place at PM Gallery, the extension to one of Sir John Soane’s great architectural treasures, Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, west London. Sitting in Walpole Park, central Ealing, Pitzhanger Manor is the ‘dream house’ designed by Soane as a place to entertain his friends and display his collection of art and antiquities. It was from Pitzhanger that Soane would make a regular walk to his central London home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, now the Sir John Soane’s Museum. Soane’s friend, the artist JMW Turner, would also visit him at Pitzhanger, the pair often walking and fishing in the surrounding parkland.
These walks, between pastoral landscape and the city, informed the sense of light, colour, weather and perspective of both artist and architect. For Soane, as for many of the Romantic poets and artists, walking was a means of freeing the imagination.
Following its preview exhibition in London, Walk On will begin a tour of venues across the UK, beginning with a larger, extended exhibition at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland (NGCA) in June, as part of the Festival of the North East. The exhibition is curated by Cynthia Morrison-Bell of Art Circuit Touring Exhibitions, Dr Mike Collier of the University of Sunderland and Alistair Robinson of the NGCA, with the collaboration of Janet Ross of VARC.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Walk On. 27 March – 6 May 2013. Admission is free to all visitors.
PM Gallery & Pitzhanger Manor, Walpole Park, Mattock Lane, Ealing, London W5 5EQ
Opening Times: Tues-Fri 1-5pm; Sat 11am-5pm; Closed Sunday and Monday, except Sun 6 May.
Further visitor information www.ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse 020 8567 1227
Travel: Trains & tube to Ealing Broadway. Buses 207, 65 & 83.
Exhibition tour dates:
Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland 1 June –31 August 2013
Aberdeen Art Gallery 29 September–23 November 2013
Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery 19 September–12 December 2014
6th March 2013