Related
Art on the Pilgrim Path
Artists working along routes and in landscapes Art has been entwined with pilgrimage from the outset, in iconography and relics, object attribution and travel souvenirs, music and folklore, and more recently in walking performances. Does a pilgrimage route become an open-air studio exhibiting the pilgrim experience? Presenters included: Professor Kathryn Barush author of Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied
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• +4 On Pilgrimage 1 – Pilgrimage Today
Working alongside the World Trails Network (WTN), a community of trail management and tourism providers, that include many traditional pilgrimage routes and trails that now accommodate secular pilgrims, we are running a series of online events to discuss the roles walking art plays in pilgrimage and vice versa. Our guests on this opening event include Professor Kathryn Barush author
• +2 Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement
While pilgrimage often focuses on sacred shrines, it can also occur in apparently mundane places. Indeed, not everyone has the resources or mobility to take part in religiously inspired movement to foreign lands, and some find meaning in religious movement closer to home and outside of officially sanctioned practices. This book argues that we must question
Related
Art on the Pilgrim Path
Artists working along routes and in landscapes Art has been entwined with pilgrimage from the outset, in iconography and relics, object attribution and travel souvenirs, music and folklore, and more recently in walking performances. Does a pilgrimage route become an open-air studio exhibiting the pilgrim experience? Presenters included: Professor Kathryn Barush author of Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied
• • +4 On Pilgrimage 1 – Pilgrimage Today
Working alongside the World Trails Network (WTN), a community of trail management and tourism providers, that include many traditional pilgrimage routes and trails that now accommodate secular pilgrims, we are running a series of online events to discuss the roles walking art plays in pilgrimage and vice versa. Our guests on this opening event include Professor Kathryn Barush author
• +2 Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement
While pilgrimage often focuses on sacred shrines, it can also occur in apparently mundane places. Indeed, not everyone has the resources or mobility to take part in religiously inspired movement to foreign lands, and some find meaning in religious movement closer to home and outside of officially sanctioned practices. This book argues that we must question
This project was conceived at the end of Lockdown 2020, with a need to regain my sense of self. During a week long stay in Lancashire I made a series of walks to re-connect. This included a pilgrimage to Clougha Pike, the reassuring presence which hangs over Lancaster, my home town. I had drawn it many times delighting in the light play over this time I walked it. The walk was an embodied transformation a line drawn in space, time and self to separate past and present in the safety of the landscape. A solitary pilgrimage to meditate, calm, and take back control through repeated movement. Through the act of wandering and getting lost I was able to locate myself, 19,273 steps later I had emerged….
Back in the studio I re-traced the walk, 19,273 steps inscribing them into paper with a skewer, scratching the surface. invisible or so it seemed, but at the end of the walk the surface had been turned into a landscape of fissures and hill, invisible scars of the journey, and the longer you looked the more was revealed …
Repeatedly rewalking the pilgrimage, each time creating a stronger image using grades of charcoal on a skewered surface the image became stronger, more defined, visible. Through the embodiment of the walk I produced a series of large holding spaces, containers for transformation of my physical body, appearing, revealing themselves. Located in the body through the body, around the body describing the space of the body. An image of power – the power of walking – of freedom, of giving oneself the space, the intention and the time to heal – becoming whole – the layers and layers of lines inscribed into the surface – repetition of practice of recovery – the minutae of healing – one step at a time – going forwards and the focus. The drawing becomes the realisation of the event, a relational description for the audience, reminiscent of Dorothy Wordsworth’s practice of walking backwards and forwards retracing her steps, when she was unable to take to the hills, an excersize in thinking, in allowing the mind to free itself through the motion of the body.
This became the basis for a solo show at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, alongside small scale drawing working with a new methodology of transfer. Repeated marks, punctured into paper to create a trace of footsteps. A meditative time-consuming process of reflection and concentration to embody repeated steps within the confines of A4 paper.
This Pilgrimage was taken to Prespa in Greece as part of the Walking Arts Encounters Conference, 2023 ‘Visions of Walking’ and Rural Facets, at Hewood Farm in 2024 and performed as a collaborative space of walking with volunteers.
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