After the Last Walk

It's now the end of the residency and I'm typing this in the coffee shop opposite the hotel I've been staying in. It's very busy today in Hathersage, a sunny Spring Sunday certainly does attract people to this area. It seems that taking in the landscape is big business in post-industrial contemporary Britain.

I'm really pleased with the results of putting the webcam pointing upwards today and wish I could walk around longer to capture more frames. Like yesterday's downward pointing series, pointing upward is not only evocative of the light, weather and objects above my head as I walk, it gives me another insight into the landscape I was walking through, one that I am not capable of percieving easily.

Talking about this as capturing data is a troubling and interesting frame, what is called 'irritierend' in German, a false friend that means something milder than 'irritating'. I'm thinking of going home now to Berlin which is perhaps why I'm thinking of German words. I'm also looking back on these few days away and what I have learned about what I set myself to do and am trying to draw some conclusions.

I think that the good thing about sketching, analogue or digital, the journal or the blog, the drawing or the photograph, is that it builds up material that can be returned to later, much as in the working methods of the landscape painters I have been haunted by. I'm wondering what I will make of all the impressions and thoughts that have been racing through my mind and body while walking in the hills in a few weeks or months when I have some distance on it all. I can only hope that the blur of thoughts slow and distil into something more legible to me than at present.

I think that the extending of a digital practice into the landscape has been difficult, not just technologically (the screen is too dim in bright daylight, the equipment too susceptible to rain) but perhaps more interestingly, there is a conceptual difficulty: What DO you do with a laptop in the landscape? I get the impression that the walkers around me would think that taking a computer on a rural walk was perverse. The laptop is the very thing you are glad to leave behind, happy that its battery won't last and that there is no internet connection, happy to be at last detatched from the working world, free to roam in the fresh air. Perhaps because as an artist I don't have such a rigid division between work and life outside work, that I have the impulse to take my tools with me when I escape, in order to bring those impressions and experiences back and share them to another audience.

In this way, Going Solo has been more about getting work done than getting away from it all, or rather getting away from it all in order to work. I am only too aware that as I type this, a number of factors have conspired to make all this possible, Miles and Anette's tireless application-writing, organisation and fund-raising, my friends that are putting me up again tonight so that I can get to the airport early tomorrow morning, and above all, my partner who is looking after our daughter at home and whom I have been away from for the past week.

To all those people, I want to send a message of heartfelt thanks and to all those who read this blog, thank you for the attention that made me feel supported through this period of Going Solo.