Can an artist residency take place through walking?
How can a consciousness in motion be held?
How does the body connect landscapes that appear fragmented from one another?
What if a residency is not a place, but a process continuously unfolding?
Starting in London, we walked east, all the way to the end of the road.
I invited three artists to join me. The four of us set out from Camberwell on a two-day walk. On the second night, after walking 76 kilometres, we arrived at the Isle of Grain.
None of us knew what the journey would become.
Fatigue, pain, the weather, and a constantly shifting sense of time gradually allowed the body to take over consciousness. My attention kept changing. At first, I was drawn to photographing trees. Later, my camera broke, and I began paying attention only to the road ahead. Eventually, cracks became what I returned to again and again.
Walking continually transformed the way I looked.
I recorded what happened along the journey through photographs, moving images, and sound. Yet the sounds did not remain as sound. Afterwards, they were transformed into poetic texts. They came from conversations between the four of us, from strangers we encountered along the way—people in pubs who offered us help, passers-by who stopped to give directions, and voices that briefly crossed our path before disappearing again.
The destination itself held no meaning.
Meaning emerged gradually through the act of moving forward. Action came before ideas. The body came before language. Even the direction of the research did not exist beforehand, but slowly revealed itself with each step.
If an artist residency is usually understood as a place of staying, this walk proposes another possibility: a residency can also exist as a state of continuous movement. Artistic practice does not have to happen within a fixed space. It can emerge through the body's ongoing passage across space. Rather than entering a place to conduct research, the artist moves through the world, allowing the environment, chance encounters, and the body itself to shape the work as it unfolds.
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