Walking in isolation in Staffordshire, England , during covid, and realising I was not alone…

Mapping a puddle with ink and rainwater led me to travel in my imagination from a small garden puddle to a landscape of possibilities and a wider elemental exploration of place that stretched beyond its physical and material boundaries.

Four works used repeatedly walked routes to map out imaginary islands. These were mapped cartographically and with sound and poetry. I am currently creating another two imagined islands.

This collaboration between the Barber Institute and Overhear materialised from local Cultural Central meeting over the Covid19 pandemic and how arts organisations are adapting to working remotely with artists and creatives.

Esther’s Willow mobilized local institutions, cultural workers, residents, and Jewish descendants and survivors of the city of Chrzanów (PL) to walk a deportation route in reverse and re-plant a white willow sapling in the former Esther’s Square.

Michinoku Homeward: Walking towards the Northeast (2021) is a very personal documentary about Michinoku, Okuyama’s home region in north-eastern Japan. Michinoku is the ancient name for the area, first appearing in a 7th century chronicle, and means “the end of the road”. 2011 was an unforgettable year of disasters there, including a catastrophic earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, causing more than 22,000 deaths. Okuyama was devastated by her powerlessness as a native of the region living abroad. Ten years later, in 2021, she walked 400km following the Edo period “Kaidо ̄ ” route - officially created at the beginning of the 17th century - from the zero mile point in Tokyo to her home town of Yamagata. Michinoku Homeward is a photo documentary of this trip, combining journalistic topicality and the poetic feelings that occurred to her along the way, capturing her way home with an awareness that it might disappear.

A binaural soundscape collected whilst taking one hour of exercise during the Covid lockdowns of 2020.

This is the 20-minute walk that my friend Henie and I have been doing every Thursday morning for over five months since the start of the covid-19 lockdown in London to do our weekly supermarket shopping. The walk starts in the Queen’s Park Estate in north-west London and ends at the Ladbroke Grove Sainsbury’s. The

Tam Beith (Beith, Gaelic for Birch). It is the hill opposite my house and for years I have been walking TamBeith from my door.

A guided sound walk around Aberdeen, comparing the currrent soundscape with location recordings made during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Six guided sound walks around five communities in North Aberdeenshire.

This project reflects through an auditory and sonic art perspective how the city sounds like without the presence of humans or the normal amount of human density in popular areas in public spaces of Belfast.