“Mollie Rice explores human spatiality, and sensations of place, through an experimental drawing practice. Multiple visits to a particular site by the artist yield sound recordings, which are then translated into drawings in the studio, creating a complex connection between percpetion and place, action and experience. The works in this exhibition were created through a series of ten thousand step walks along Parramatta Road, starting from a place of significance to the artist and ending in a new location, which is then explored through processes of active listening and the physical record of drawing. ” (credit)
Category Archives: Chance
Margaret Seymour, Walking in the Colour Field: Local and Remote (2018)
“WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD: LOCAL AND REMOTE (2018)
ArticulateUpstairs, Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt, Sydney.
WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD is an interactive artwork that takes place both inside and beyond the gallery. By wearing a specially designed sensor armband, two ‘remote’ participants who are simply going about their daily lives determine the colours displayed on the largest screen. The smaller screen responds to changes inside the gallery. Its ‘local’ colours are affected by viewers passing in front of the adjacent painted panels. Placed in public view but communicating across multiple sites, WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD echoes the way that public and private spaces are increasingly entwined through mobile technologies.
WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD was presented in FOOTSTEPS IN THE CORRIDOR, the final exhibition in a series curated by Nadia Odlum on the theme of Navigation.” (credit)
Bill Gilbert, Walk to Work (2009)
“For twenty-two years I have made the hour long drive from my house in Cerrillos to my office at the University of New Mexico. For this piece, I decided to walk to work. I strapped on a backpack, headed out my door and walked as straight a line as possible (given the variations in topography, land ownership, etc.) to my office at UNM. Along the roughly 50 mile trek across ranch land, the Sandia Mountains and the northeast quadrant of Albuquerque I recorded my perceptions from the perspective of a lone hiker walking across the land.
This work is part of a series of “Physiocartographies.” Started in 2003 in the field with the Land Arts of the American West mobile studio, the physiocartographies series combines the abstraction of cartographic maps with the physical act of walking the surface of the planet to create portraits of place. In the various works from this series I follow prescribed paths across the landscape using a gps unit to navigate and record points, a camera to shoot images and a digital recorder to capture sounds. The final works appear as reconstructed maps, videos and installations.” (credit)
Diane Borsato, Touching 1000 People (2001-2003)
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Diane Borsato, The China Town Foray (2008-10)
“The China Town Foray, Intervention and photographs, 2008 – 2010
I invited the Mycological Association of Toronto (an amateur mushroom hunting club) to go on a mycological foray in “Chinatown” or, the Chinese supermarkets and medicinal shops in Markham, Toronto. With field guides and magnifying glasses, we debated Latin species names and toured the suburban marketplace in the same manner that we would research and identify Ontario fungi in the forest or field.
Special thanks for the work and expertise of Alan Gan, and the participating members of the Mycological Society of Toronto.
The event took place in various locations in Markham, Toronto, in the summer of 2008. In 2010, the urban forage was repeated in New York City, with the collaboration of the New York Mycological Society. Special thanks to guest mycologists Paul Sadowski and Gary Lincoff.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
AGYU, Terrestrial / Celestial and Walking Studio, curated by Emelie Chhangur , Spring 2012, Toronto
Articule Gallery, Terrestrial/Celestial, Presented as part of Mois de la Photo, curated by Anne-Marie Ninacs, Fall 2011, Montreal, Canada
Umami Festival Performance, The New York Foray, Urban foraging events with the New York Mycological Society. Curated by Yael Raviv, Spring 2010, New York City
Mercer Union, The Chinatown Foray, Solo exhibition, main space, Fall 2009, Toronto” (credit)
Aislinn Thomas, The Slow Walkers of Whycocomaugh (2012)
“Slow Walkers of Whycocomagh and Fast Walkers of Whycocomagh came about to address
what seems like an age-old problem: how to spend time walking with other people who
have an ideal pace different from your own. Negotiating precisely what “slow” and “fast”
looked like on any given day was an interesting part of the experience, as was noticing the different relationships to each other and the landscape facilitated by the different speeds. This piece was originally part of a larger project, the Whycocomagh Skillshare, which was conceived of in response to living in a rural context, in an intentional community that centres people labelled with intellectual disabilities. The skillshare took form as an ongoing series of free workshops, presentations and activities and was an attempt to actively seek out connection, engagement and exchange while challenging normative ideas of expertise and value. Since then, the slow walking groups have taken place in a mall in Mississauga, along rivers and downtown streets in Cambridge and on a mountain trail in Banff.”
Credit: Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art edited by Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato. Page 120.
William Anastasi, Untitled (Pocket Drawings) (1969)
“Anastasi folded these sheets into eight squares, making them small enough to fit into his pocket. As he walked, he held a tiny, soft pencil against the exposed paper inside the cramped space of his pocket; the resulting marks graph his movements. When he deemed a section complete, Anastasi refolded the sheet, creating a new blank surface, and the process began again. “I love walking,” the artist has explained. “I find that walking does something to my thinking, to my mental process, that is different from sitting or lying down.” These “pocket drawings” are part of a broader practice that Anastasi has described as “unsighted,” including works made while walking (holding a pad, he looks at his destination as he draws) and riding the subway (the train’s stops and starts, bumps and turns, direct the line’s size, weight, and orientation). — Gallery label from A Trip from Here to There, March 15–July 30, 2013.
George Brecht, Direction (1962)

George Brecht, Direction (1962) – credit
Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series (1973-78)
“The “Siluetas” comprise more than 200 earth-body works that saw the artist burn, carve, and mold her silhouette into the landscapes of Iowa and Mexico. The sculptures made tangible Mendieta’s belief of the earth as goddess, rooted in Afro-Cuban Santería and the indigenous Taíno practices of her homeland. Exiled from Cuba at a young age, Mendieta said that she was “overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature).” Seeking a way to, in her words, “return to the maternal source,” she used her body to commune with sand, ice, and mud, among other natural media, as a way to “become one with the earth.”
Yet these works resist easy categorization in form or theme. The “Siluetas” are not self-portraits or performance pieces, except perhaps to the few who witnessed them. Each piece was subsumed by the earth, meaning photographs are the only remaining traces. Similarly, the thematic complexity of Mendieta’s life and these sculptures resist collapsing into neat categories of nation, diaspora, race, or gender. By using the body as both an image and medium, these aspects of identity are complicated. Mendieta’s earthworks occupy a liminal space between presence and absence, balancing the inevitable politicization of the self while searching for meaning in older, sacred traditions. …
The “Siluetas” were an ongoing, ritualistic relationship between Mendieta and the land. I read each work as a spell, a fragment of an ongoing incantation that was not “the final stage of a ritual but a way and a means of asserting my emotional ties with nature,” as Mendieta once said. She wanted to send “an image made out of smoke into the atmosphere,” so that each work was designed to disappear, to be reclaimed by the force she revered in an effort to come closer to it.” [credit]
“Spanning performance, sculpture, film, and drawing, Ana Mendieta‘s work revolves around the body, nature, and the spiritual connections between them. A Cuban exile, Mendieta came to the United States in 1961, leaving much of her family behind—a traumatic cultural separation that had a huge impact on her art. Her earliest performances, made while studying at the University of Iowa, involved manipulations to her body, often in violent contexts, such as restaged rape or murder scenes. In 1973 she began to visit pre-Columbian sites in Mexico to learn more about native Central American and Caribbean religions. During this time the natural landscape took on increasing importance in her work, invoking a spirit of renewal inspired by nature and the archetype of the feminine.1. Ana Mendieta, quoted in Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perrault, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), p. 10.
2. Ana Mendieta, “A Selection of Statements and Notes,” Sulfur (Ypsilanti, Mich.) no. 22 (1988), p. 70.” [credit]
Rebecca Gallo, One Walk Sculptures (2016)
“A series of found object assemblages, each comprising objects collected during a single walk departing from and returning to home. Exhibited in Written In Time curated by Catherine Benz at Delmar Gallery, Ashfield, January-February 2016.” [credit]
“On walking: in mid-2014, I adopted a dog and I started walking. We would walk for at least an hour a day, and she was quick to sniff out scraps of food: half-eaten kebabs, chicken bones, that sort of thing. So, I would scan the ground, trying to spot hazards before she did, and quickly I started to notice other things. Bright coils of wire from electrical repairs; stray nuts and washers; the translucent green of expired whipper snipper cords. Handwritten notes,
packaging moulds and small weights from the rims of car tyres nestled into the crooks of gutters.
Collecting and using found objects was already part of my artistic practice, but the act of walking changed and focused this. A walk came to be told through the haul of items I could hold in my hand or fit in my pockets. Human movement, traced and told through human discards.”