Joe Richardson explores how walking and drawing activate shifts between roles and selves in Drawing Walks and Intervals as Activation Devices.
His work is shortlisted for the Marŝarto Awards 2025. Below, Joe reflects on the work.

Moving between roles

Many contemporary artists will relate to feeling that they are constantly required to move between different roles and identities, switching headspaces, skill sets and personalities. This mode of being requires a great deal of effort, fluidity and flexibility, often within short periods of transition between the roles of artist, researcher, teacher, employee, partner and human being.

I noticed I am forever walking between my various roles, between work and the studio, the studio and home and an abundant range of these combinations. My research began when I was walking home after delivering a ‘Portraits 1’ drawing session at City Lit, London. I was charged with the energy conjured from the session and the buzz of performing my role as a tutor, delivering my enthusiasm for the subject, but without having produced anything physical. My body was fizzing with potential kinetic energy.
This energy remained with me as I walked from City Lit to Charing Cross Station, boarded the train, sat still, thoughts racing, headed home to Elmstead Woods.

Making Intervals – Walking and Drawing

The in-between moments, or, intervals, where I move between spaces, both physically and mentally, had previously been left dormant, ignored in my daily multidisciplinary practices of art-making, teaching and commuting – though often filled with thoughts that carry ideas for new artworks, tasks I need to complete, and on occasion harmonies to songs I’ve written, they mostly involve preparation for my next performance of self.
Occasionally, I have read on the train, made drawings, answered emails, or taken a nap; however, the walks between my roles and various spaces had previously existed as perfunctory and necessary transitions from one place to another, charged with emotion and anxiety.

As I walked up the hill from Elmstead Woods, towards home, I decided I needed something to occupy my mind, my feet, my hands – my whole body. I began to walk and draw simultaneously. This practice formed what I now consider to be an “activation device” (Springgay and Truman, 2018).

Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman describe an activation device as an act that “forces something to occur, such as walking sideways, walking backwards, walking with rocks in your pocket.. it changes the gait of the walk.” The activation device alters how an individual moves through space and potentially offers a new way to move between the combined roles of what Mindy Carter describes as the “a/r/tographer” (Carter, 2014), the multidisciplinary and intertwining practices of artist/researcher/teacher.

In my experience, shifts and movements between roles and practices occur in many forms, often overlapping or, to use a Carterian term, “reverberating”(Carter, 2014) into one another. This experience is complex, and there is a lot of mental material to be examined, which is precisely what I was trying to do in the act of drawing and walking simultaneously. I was attempting to harness those moments, the shifts in motion, through pen on paper. I was experimenting with moving from being a teacher to a human being first, and then, hopefully, towards a more creative space. Walking and drawing simultaneously helped me to process the morning’s teaching. In this act, I was suddenly present in my surroundings, walking through the woods, capturing the ever-changing perspective unfolding before me.

Collaboration, moving towards a shared practice of walking and drawing

For the next year, I continued walking and drawing to produce drawings that formed the basis for a new collection of paintings for my first London solo-show, Walk the Line.
The process for making these works was introspective, walking alone, retracing and projecting the drawings onto canvas in my garden shed studio, producing and showing in solitude. In 2024, I took a short trip to Venice, performing drawing walks as I moved through the city. My visit coincided with the Biennale Arte 2024: Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, where I encountered Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project 2008-11. Her installation stopped me in my tracks. The power projected from the simplicity of a drawn line on paper describing the movement of eight individuals as they travelled across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, shifting between immigration statuses, levels of human rights, moving in and out of the parameters of the law as they transit across borders, had me completely arrested. Khalili’s work and the accounts of the individuals deeply humbled me in terms of its ability to engage with a distinct group of people, offering support by producing a platform for them to tell their stories, to map and reflect on their journeys with the potent tools of the human voice and pen on paper. I felt an affinity with Khalili’s work and began to explore methods ofusing my drawing walks to support the mental wellbeing and creativity of others. I devised a series of drawing walks with participants in a similar situation to my own, i.e. being an artist working in full-time employment to support a creative practice, trying to navigate and balance these roles.

Collaborative Meaning Making

I held drawing walks with four employees from UAL Short Courses, beginning at our workplace, Central Saint Martins in Kings Cross, to destinations defined by each participant. Two of the walks took place along the South Bank, with the others ending in Russell Square and High Holborn. We walked, talked and drew simultaneously.
Following the walks, I conducted interviews with each participant as part of what Claudia Mitchell terms as a “shared analysis”(Mitchell et al, 2011) of the exercise undertaken and the drawings produced using questions from Gillian Rose’s interrogation of the “site of production”(Rose, 2001) such as “what were the social identities of the maker, the owner and the subject of the image?”(Rose,2001,p.17). In conducting the evaluative questioning, I quickly realised that I had taken on another role: the interviewer. I reflected with participants to explore what it meant for them to shift between practices, to understand how they transition between roles, and to learn from their strategies and methods for managing their multidisciplinary practices.

Experimental Re-Encounter / Making Intervals Revisited

Following the collaborative drawing walks, I began to use the walking and drawing device as both a productive device for making drawings for paintings and cyanotypes, and also as a reflective tool, to examine how talking, walking, and drawing could facilitate a combined process of making and evaluation. I experimented with drawing directly from participants’ drawings made on our walks together, taking influence from Raymond Lucas’s Getting Lost in Tokyo project and his process of drawing from research drawings. I produced new images from the drawings we made, collaging together our collective knowledge into new quasi-exquisite-corpse ‘Portraits’ that blur and reverberate our experiences together through cyanotype, oil paint and digital images.

These works were produced in the gaps between my various practices, for example, during lunch breaks and times between meetings. I identified how the short walks I would make downstairs, into the garden to get away from my desk, offered equal potential for making as walking from work to the station. Nithikul Nimkulrat’s reflections on evaluation as a productive tool helped me to realise that most of my self-evaluation takes place whilst walking and talking simultaneously. I am currently exploring how I can use this evaluative space as a creative act. For example, I have used the time on my commute to work to write and record the draft of this article. As I speak into my iPhone, this act confirms to me that my voice is my preferred tool to think and to write with, because I can write as I think, and by extension, I think I write as I draw. This process enables flow; it encounters emotions and ideas emerging within me, i.e., thoughts that arrive and pass through my mind, allowing me to move with them with presence and mindfulness.

Dissemination / Sharing Practice

The participants described the walks as helping them to move physically and mentally towards a creative headspace: “It kind of brings you more grounded.” (Hong, 2025), “Travelling allows you to change your identity”(Bonfield, 2025). They have reflected on their experiences of “companionship” (Bonfield, 2025) and emerging dialogues that have continued beyond the research project, both inside and outside of the work environment.

This research project has redefined my understanding of self as a practice-led researcher and validated the coexistence of my multiple identities as an artist, teacher and researcher. I recognise I am enough. I am doing enough. I have accepted my multidisciplinary situation and recognise the affordances available in my various roles, e.g. access to studio spaces, libraries and the opportunity to complete a Master’s Degree and how these spaces can support my artistic practice alongside employment. To quote Katie Burke et al., I am choosing to “engage in the messiness of creative identities and to (re)ignite the joy of making as a/r/tographers… engaging in and (inter)thinking through collective a/r/tography and the generative openings and professional learning that arises from doing research enquiries together”(Burke et al, 2024).

I am sharing my drawing walks as a tool to help others to switch off and transition from their multidisciplinary practices working with filmmakers, speech analysts, lecturers, family and friends. I am still learning what the drawing and walking process does and the long-standing impact that this activation device might have on creative practice or wellbeing for myself and others. There is still so much room for collaboration in this project, so if you’re reading this, please reach out. I would love to collaborate with you. If the geography permits, let’s go on a drawing walk together. If not, please share your experiences of walking and drawing with me. Feel free to make changes, activate thedrawing walks with your own ideas and experiences. Let’s work together to develop what this drawing tool could be, because I think there’s great power in moving from space to space with intention, as my colleague Seema Aggarwal has invited me to think about: How can the processes of drawing, walking and reflecting on practice help a person to arrive at a destination with intention, or not? I am continuing to evaluate and explore the potential in these walks as a site for creative work. And the idea that sometimes creative work is doing absolutely nothing. It can constitute simply walking and drawing a line with your feet on a map, never traced or reproduced. It is the return to those walks, those spaces, with intention, fluidity, and flexibility, which I hope will enable me and others to accept the interdisciplinary and multifaceted identities that we all will most likely continue to shift between and hopefully find the value in the process.

The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2025 will be announced in late January 2026.