Firstly my work is based on walking, both through the Witham Valley of Lincolnshire along the Long Distance Viking Way footpath, skirting the Lincolnshire Limewoods (the subject of Assignment 3) and latterly focusing on walking through the woodlands themselves. Walking is the basis of my work and I see it still being an important part. Secondly, there is a great deal of beauty in the woods to which I, like many others are attracted. However, there is also a darker side to nature and landscape, and it is important that this, too, is represented.
Walking is a way of travelling slowly through the landscape and enables meditation and reflection. It has been the focus for a wide range of people for centuries. Ancient Greek philosophers used it as a means to aid the formulation of their theories as did, more recently, Rousseau who claimed to be incapable of thinking properly, of composing, creating or finding inspiration except when walking. Wordsworth, who is, in some sense, the founding father of modern walking for pleasure (although he inherited a long tradition of walking himself) walked up to 30 miles a day and was another who used walking as a creative vehicle. As well as writers and thinkers, walking is an inspiration for artists and photographers: Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Fay Godwin (who was president of the Ramblers Association), Paul Gaffney, Claudia Rohrauer and Michal Iwanowski .
As I walk I ask myself many questions. Why am I affected in the way I am by the beautiful, intricate detail of nature around me? Why are these things here? Why and how are they as they are? Is the world as it is because it was made by a creator god, or is the Earth and everything on it, and the rest of the universe, simply governed by the laws of physics? If we stop noticing these things will we allow them to disappear as Robert MacFarlane suggests? If I see nature as a sort of utopia, why do others leave waste, kill and destroy what I see as beauty? Another thought to ponder is that very little of our woodland is pristine wilderness and what, in some cases, may seem to be deposition of rubbish is part of the detritus of management by man rather than wanton despoliation.
So, how to present this work. As it is a walk I could display it as a linear representation with wider shots interspersed with close-ups of nature and those images that are more unsettling. This would also maybe work as a linear series of prints. Another way to do this would be to present the images in pairs with a 'perfect' image of nature side by side with a more uncomfortable picture and somehow incorporating images of the paths I have walked. Perhaps one way of presenting in this style would be as a PDF viewed as double pages or as a book with pairs of images opposite each other representing, as has been suggested to me, utopia v. dystopia. If I produced a book perhaps a cover could be made out of very thin sheets of polished limewood. If using prints they could be arranged in pairs interspersed with single images representing the footpaths.
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