Walkcreate: Walking Together as Site Specific Performance

This chapter discusses how walking art employs site-specific practices to explore issues of access, power and visibility in contemporary settings across the UK. Focusing on artists commissioned to create new socially engaged work as part of the WalkCreate project, it explores the use of creative walking as a sustainable, inclusive and engaging artistic tool. These new works centre walking with diverse communities traditionally excluded or underrepresented in walking art. The co-authors include practising artists whose lived experiences enrich this account. WalkCreate and the artists we work with embody a commitment to enacting expanded walking practices built on an ethics of care, respect and the right of all bodies to be included in creative walking. WalkCreate (aka Walking Publics/Walking Arts: Walking, Wellbeing and Community During Covid-19) was a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council exploring the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic. Part of the project aimed to capture how artists have used walking as part of their work during COVID-19, whether as a familiar resource or a new opportunity. We launched the WalkCreate Gallery to showcase work made by artists between March 2020 and May 2021 (Heddon et al 2022) that used walking as a key method, tool or medium for their work. We also conducted an artists’ survey and a series of interviews. The project also enabled the creation of eight new walking art commissions; these aimed to mitigate some of the barriers to walking that we have identified as part of our research. Here we focus particularly on three of those commissions: Henna Asikainen's ongoing project is a collaboration with refugees and asylum seekers in Newcastle aiming to challenge exclusionary cultural practices. Kate Green's Finding a Way developed a “non-linear heritage trail” around Leominster, with, and for, people who live with dementia. Shonagh Short's To the Moon and Back looked at the journey to and from school as an act of care and addressed issues around class, gender and exclusion. As socially engaged artists, the lines between audience and participant are blurred, as are the boundaries of the performance space. In different ways, and at differing scales, each work illuminates common concerns around belonging, community, care and the fluctuating relationships between people, place, power and performance. Asikainen, Green and Short all invite us to reconsider our everyday landscape and utilise walking as an aesthetic tool.