Artist/researcher critically exploring walking, social media and intangible cultural heritage.
Walking-with, walking and asking questions, as a creative, ecological, non-confrontational engagement with obscured and reluctant heritage.
Most recent articles
Breaking the Dead Silence revisited: a discussion
Tuesday 15 April: Breaking the Dead Silence revisitedBristol PRSC 18.30-20.00Details and tickets here: https://www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/whats-on/prsc/tue-15-apr-breaking-the-dead-silence-127816#e127816In the lead up to the Bristol Transformed festival, an evening conversation about walking, memorialisation and colonialism. I will be talking about my current practice and building out from contributions to the book published last year. Locating the sites of memory, listening for the spectres, te [...]
Night Tone: Clare Qualmann, Saba Zavarei and Claire Hind
A night time headlight lit journey along Cornwall’s unforgiving sunken stone walled lanes following cues and memorised directions for a dont-trust-the-satnav destination. Arrived in a puddled carpark, engine silenced and lights out. Kestle Barton, we hoped What follows are some thoughts and impressions from joining a small group of artists and scholars for an, experimental work in progress performance by Clare Qualmann, Saba Zavarei and Claire Hind.towards the end of their residenc [...]
Ten years walking and asking questions
For the past 10 years I have been hosting walks creatively exploring hidden, obscured and often uncomfortable histories, legacies of slave-ownership and colonialism. In July our book: Breaking the Dead Silence: Engaging with the Legacies of Empire and Slave-Ownership in Bath and Bristol’s Memoryscapes was published by Liverpool University Press. Here I set out some background to the book, and my approach to walking arts through a sketch of a recent Heritage Open Days walk at Bath Spa Unive [...]
Breaking the Dead Silence: book launches and a walk
Nineteen diverse and distinctive voices in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol. As the dust gathers on the now recumbent statue, a museum artefact, here are timely commentaries. Insights and experiences in the memoryscape seeking to enrich and transform an uncomfortable heritage through empathy and creativity. Multiple perspectives from academics, artists, activists and heritage professionals, contribute ideas and strategies towards re- [...]
Botanical Encounters: exhibition
Contributing a sound track made from walks in Sydney Gardens, Bath and the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide. Echoes and resonances of the work in South Australia last year beginning to seep into the work. Listen to the birds. The white settlers didnt like the sound of the indigeneous birds so they imported English song birds whilst exporting the bones of the indigenous people. Colonial extraction at its most brutal. Re-reading Fanon again. [...]
Tulips and Tractors: a walk between
A circular walk towards and through the site of the former Inglescombe Nursery (Wares) from Bath City Farm to From the Land and back. A memorable day. This write up has been a long time coming. Maybe because it took place on April Fools Day, No fools walking on this though! The report below is ghosted from an interview I gave for a colleague in the Research Office at Bath Spa University, many thanks for the hard work doing the write up.Read the article here or scroll through below [...]
Botanical Encounters 22 Feb: Two talks and a walk
Wednesday 22 February 2023 19.00-20.30 @ BRLSI Elwin RoomColonial and Botanical Heritage in Two Spa Towns: Bath in Britain and Bath in Jamaica. A talk by Dr Christina HorvathThis talk seeks to decrypt the colonial connections of two spa towns of the same name, Bath in Somerset, England, and Bath in the parish of St Thomas, Jamaica and explore how their environment and green spaces have been impacted by their shared colonial history. Bath in Somerset benefited from profit drawn from enslaved labo [...]
Botanical Encounters
I am really excited to be contributing toBOTANICAL ENCOUNTERSThis project, curated by Dr Christina Horvath, aims to disentangle Bath’s often overlooked colonial legacies by looking at the impact of colonial voyages and conquest, imperial science, botanical and arts collections and the global displacement of plants and humans.The project received funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust to promote encounters in Bath around plants and green sp [...]
Tulips and Tractors
Tracing feral routes and ecologies between the site of Ware’s Nursery and Bath City Farm;Prospecting for local histories of growing;Exploring the potential of regenerative farming.A scoping and capacity building project November 2022 to April 2023 nurturing conversations and networks through the development and delivery of a public walk connecting across the Whiteway Road in BathBuilding on the creative and collaborative working practices of Blooming Whiteway and Bath City Farm and [...]
Two events, one of which is cancelled! Sunday 11 September
A boot from the installation which will be happening at Bath Jewish Burial Ground resonates with the Orwellian culture wars currently rumbling in the city. Sydney Gardens Gala…. a skirmish in the culture warsOn September 11 I was planning to split my day between setting up the Honouring Esther installation and hosting a couple of walks in Sydney Gardens, Bath. This was to have been a reprise of the work I completed last November on Botany, Empire and Deep Time. I was looking f [...]
Their only crime was poverty
Their Only Crime Was PovertyJohn Payne's booklet about the Bath Workhouse is now publishedThe booklet sets out the facts as in the Museum of Bath at Work exhibition of 2017 and traces the story through from before the 1834 Poor Law Act to the present St Martin’s Hospital. This was the exhibition that began the Workhouse Walks programme and my collaboration with John, leading on to the Walking the Names walks that we kept going through the lock downs.‘Workhouse to Hospital&rsqu [...]
Walking with Bath’s ‘Uncomfortable’ Past
A new walking trail launches in Bath on March 28, a group hosted by Bath University is publishing a public trail identifying some of the City's connections with the Atlantic slave trade. The route invites the walker to visit a city built on the wealth generated in the trade in, and labour of, captured and enslaved Africans. The map identifies the former residencies of slave-owners and their coded memorials in the Abbey. Building on the work done by activists, researchers and artists inclu [...]
Talking walking, stumbling on race and Bath
Fairfield House in Bath, once the war-time home of Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, his family and the government of Ethiopia in exile, was a gift to the city. . The House is a significant site of pilgrimage for Rastafarians and is becoming a centre for art and performance. One of the latest developments is a radio station, Imperial Voice Radio. I was invited on to the In Our City show for a conversation about walking, race and equality in Bath, amongst other things.Click the image [...]
Reshaping Memoryscapes in Bath and Bristol after the Fall of Colston….a call for contributions.
Following the amazing counter mapping workshop at 44AD artspace in Bath two years ago, the co-created storms in teacups and international street art work last year and the continuing resonances of the Sweet Waters project, I am collaborating on a publication with Dr Christina Horvath from the University of Bath.Attending to Legacies of Slave-ownership and Enslavement: Reshaping Memoryscapes in B [...]
Walking the Names: looking ahead
This is an invitation to join Walking the Names at the Bath Union Workhouse Burial Ground on Wellsway Bath Sunday 1 November at 11.00-13.00A slow and socially distanced walk.Some good news:The grass has been cut again, and again the evolving 'poor' memorial has survived. It looks like it is now recognised again in the cutting plan.The soundwalk made with the recordings we generated during lockdown has been nominated for an international award in Sound Walk September 2020! Its here: [...]
Walking the Names a distant echo
Walking the Names continued through the (first?) lockdown, many walkers recorded and shared their readings. Readings came in from around Bath, Bristol and beyond; one regular came in from Denmark. As we now return to the burial ground itself those distant readings have continued. This is a short film using readings made on Bornholm Island in the Baltic mixed with a fragment from the reading on the burial ground at the beginning of August.The project has generated widespread interest as well as l [...]
A ‘poor’ memorial renewed
For the past 10 months, every first Sunday of the month without fail, I have been hosting a group Walking the Names at the Bath Union Workhouse Burial ground. Each month to the toll of the Workhouse bell we have walked and read and reflected on a group of names from the burial register, reading them day by day and month by month of their burial. Each month and on our own walks we have honoured the space and respected the dead, leaving flowers, stones and flags at a ruined and almost erase [...]
a letter from (no place like) Home
All correspondence now begins with the routine, but heartfelt,Dear Friend, hope you are safe and well...and I do….In my nuclear armageddon nightmares a half life and more ago I used to imagine the slow cloud of fallout drifting towards us on the weather, invisible and deadly.So I have dreamed these moments of spring grass and green, yellow, blue,when the plant world bursts into life.But in the joy of this moment there is dread.Strange walking at dawn,getting up early to get out, no [...]
Sara’s Last Steps
In May I should have been walking with co-artist Lorna Brunstein developing a programme of work for installation at the Lake District Holocaust Project. Sara's Last Steps would have taken place during a weekend of events commemorating the arrival of a group of Jewish child refugees to a location near Windermere in 1945. The weekend included a planned reunion of those still living and able to travel plus their families and descendants. Sadly the virus has put paid to that and the proj [...]
Walking the Names goes online
Walking the Names onlineWalking the Names goes online as the virus closes us down to isolation and social distancing. An informal trawl of those who had joined the first few monthly walks resulted in nearly twenty walkers interested in taking part on line. Each walker was issued with 20 names from either 1862 or 1863 entries in the Register of Burials at the Bath Union Workhouse Burial ground just off the Wells Way. This brings a whole new set of voices to the project and as they get stitc [...]
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Harleigh Fungalford Castle: an audio guide to an imagined heritage ruin
This sound walk through an imaginary castle can be performed at any 'heritage' site. The guide challenges how visitors experience the prompts of historical interpretation by adding layers of imagined history that are mysterious and arbitrary. The style imitates conventional interpretive audio guides, before revealing a narrative that is non-didactic, destabilizing, weird and comical. I made space for class commentary and for including the more-than-human. This audio was mostly improvised while walking and slightly refined afterwards. It was then recorded at five different sites, including two Norman ruined castles, one in England and one in Wales and a Neolithic burial chamber. You may begin this walk anywhere. It is intended to take 25-45 minutes.
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