My Imagined Islands are embodied in two works – Alnay and Walking Contención Island.

Alnay
Alnay is an imaginary island in north Northumberland. Grown out of a 2017 work (four rants for the summer solstice) which as I was creating it, I was aware that I was walking along a number of the same paths on multiple occasions. Tracing out the routes that I used to navigate my way between the locations, rather than the ‘as the crow flies’ lines of the underlying score, began to identify these common routes, traces that formed an integral part of my walking there. So, when my walking at this scale was applied repeatedly it traced out a walked edge, a lived boundary, a limit of my embodied walking. The lines started to create an edge, an outline, and the shape on the map began to remind me of islands I had worked and walked on – Fair Isle, or Papa Westray, or Beàrnaraigh. Whilst still an outline, it was becoming a shoreline, and so emerged the idea of the creation of my own imaginary island. I visited my imaginary island on the summer solstice in June 2021 and, starting at sunrise, I made a quadrophonic recording of my walking the shore in a clockwise direction. I also composed a prose poem from notes made immediately after completing the walk.

Walking Contención Island
Walking Contención Island became my response to the three periods of lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic in England. The work evolved over the 12 months from the start of the first lockdown to the end of the third. Based around my home in Newcastle upon Tyne, it was a series of three works in which I was working with all my categories of island walking, plus my experiences of embodied walking and replication. Following on from Alnay I created my second imaginary island through walking and marking out the routes walked. Then, as I had done on Papa Westray, Beàrnaraigh Mor and Alnay, I walked (a)round it, in a clockwise circumnavigation of its shoreline using random procedures to sequence my daily shoreline walks. In the third work I once more used random procedures, this time to identify and sequence the locations for recording the sounds of the island. This was also replication, in that the island, once created, was used again and again as a creative place.