movement-fields (interior)

(2015) Exhibition and Residency.
Arteles Creative Centre, Hämeenkyrö, Finland, August.

A selection of works from "movement-fields" was exhibited in August 2016 at Red Gallery, Melbourne.

Creative research practice was published in the 2017 journal article: "Measuring Movements in the Field: Practices of surveying community walking areas in Finland and Australia", Transformations Journal, iss. 30, (open access): http://www.transformationsjournal.org/

"movement-fields" is a series of works created during a 2015 summer artist residency in rural Finland. Focusing on the act of walking through forests and woodlands, the works explores how we reorient, align and move with environmental experiences that immerse us.

The series contemplates the way we might sense and respond to movement in the forest environment. The works are both a document of my experiences in the local environment and an invitation for viewers to contemplate the ways in which we move alongside the micro movements already occurring in an environment.

While walking through the forest our movements are entangled with a range of other movements: the trees, wind, grass, insects, rocks and moss are moving together, growing together, in and around each other. It is an ecology of micro-movements that we enter. We adjust our movements as we sense the environment around us: the wind, light, pressure of our footsteps, or balancing as we move. Each step pushes one movement into another. For instance, the pressure of a foot on a stick cracks the wood, splinters of it scatter into the grass, shifting the undergrowth and creating further movements.

Field sketches.
Flagging tape, finnish graph paper, mounted on A5 card.

Field Sketches is a series of sketches and collages made while walking in the forest. Each sketch is a distorted representation of both the visual landscape that I witnessed (the perspective sketches in pen) and the approximation of the ground's topography that I was standing on (represented by the orange flagging tape). The result is a representation of practices in the "field", surveying, sketching and moving through the forest landscapes.

Tracing movements.
Time-lapse video of forest surveys.

The bright orange "flagging tape" is commonly used to survey a landscape, mapping out coordinates by tying the tape to surrounding trees, rocks, or stretching out along the ground. These are playful experiments of trying to "survey" a small site on the ground that was frequently walked over. The flagging tape was fed through the undergrowth in and around paths and left in the forest for several weeks.

Panoramic walking.
Interactive projection installation. Sticks, flagging tape, Mac computer, projector, bluetooth trackpad.

Above: detail view of interactive projection. A track pad moves the images. Panoramic forest scenes move with-and-against dizzying stop-motion images of walking on the forest floor.

Visitors are invited to walk along the path of sticks. As people walk, the sticks break, movements are dispersed, and the installation shifts, adjusts, and re-settles.

 

Click here to see the blog from my residency period (opens new window).

Click here to see the collaborative work I made with Shinobu Terada during the residency.