In 2012, Mike Collier was invited by Dove Cottage (the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere) to create new works alongside the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, exploring her experience of walking through the Lake District. Dorothy’s journals frequently record her daily routes, observations of nature, and the rhythms of movement, transforming walking into a poetic act.

Collier’s works, including The Ring, respond directly to these walking narratives. Using pastel over printed manuscripts, he emphasizes both the textual and emotional traces of Dorothy’s footsteps, capturing the patterns of her mobility alongside the landscapes she traversed. In The Wind Seized Our Breath, Collier translates Dorothy’s descriptive words: Gowbarrow, Misty morning, Daffodils, into vertical, calligraphic forms, echoing the structure of Far Eastern poems while evoking the physicality and rhythm of walking through these familiar places.

Across these pieces, the act of walking becomes central: Dorothy’s journal entries provide the movement and routes, while Collier’s visual interpretation transforms them into abstract, color-coded explorations of her pathways, pauses, and reflections, linking the bodily experience of walking with poetic and artistic expression.

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Found on Mike Collier’s website.