This walking-based installation was created in response to Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais for the exhibition Field/Family Secrets, curated by artist SuperMrin at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

I call my walking drawings “Cultivators” and this one was named Cultivator 6.5.2024.128: Mrin, Peter, Jean, Eustache, Pierre, Jacques, Emily, Emily, Emma, Cameron, Spencer, Taft, Caroline, Lou, Tucker, Steve, Dave, & Auguste for the Burghers, students, and artists who shared the walking experience with me. The cultivator transformed the museum’s floor into a terrain of movement and memory, a carved path of soil and mulch that traced the motion of trudging, walking, and bearing weight.

The work began outside the museum walls, through weeks of walking with students from the College of Art and Design and through solitary walks across the city’s parks and industrial edges. Together we studied the gestures of historical walkers…workers, refugees, enslaved people, mothers, migrants, and more…whose movements shaped the ground we now traverse. We carried those imagined walks into our own bodies, testing how the rhythm of steps, the sound of gravel underfoot, or the shift of weight on a hill could be translated into material form.

In workshops, we collected remnants of the earth, mulch, straw, soil, seed husks, tracing paths on the studio floor that mirrored the curves of real and remembered journeys. These temporary cultivators served as rehearsals for the museum installation, where I walked in earth-mulch to create a dark pathway that flowed before the bronze feet of Rodin’s Burghers. The carved channel of bare floor echoed Rodin’s sculpted weight and the story of the Burghers’ slow, condemned procession through their own city.

Placed within the museum’s architecture, Cultivator 6.5.2024.128: Mrin, Peter, Jean, Eustache, Pierre, Jacques, Emily, Emily, Emma, Cameron, Spencer, Taft, Caroline, Lou, Tucker, Steve, Dave, & Auguste invited the scent of soil and the tactile presence of labor into a space of stillness and authority. The installation’s earth surface bore the marks of dragging, circling, and sweeping actions performed during its making. The path’s curvature recalled both erosion and grace, its pale undersurface revealed where walking had pressed through the mulch, the same way persistence presses through history.

SuperMrin’s curatorial premise, that contemporary artists might “walk beside” Rodin’s figures rather than after them, guided the collaborative process. My response replaced heroic bronze with fragile ground, re-situating endurance in the humble gesture of walking. The work linked the Burghers’ 14th-century civic sacrifice to present-day movements for justice and belonging.

The accompanying documentation captures the duality of the project: students walking in cold air across Cincinnati hillsides, their line of bodies recalling pilgrimage and protest; the museum interior transformed into an earthen corridor, where smell and texture replaced monumentality. The close-up photographs reveal that the piece is not static sculpture but evidence of motion, disappearance, and renewal.

By walking with people in the present and the past, a practice expanded into a social engagement. The walking as cultivation became a way of preparing the ground for collective attention. Within the museum, that act became both memorial and proposal, a reminder that the human body’s simplest action, walking, continues to remake the world.