Alison Lloyd
The Contemporary
Art of Walking

4 September 2011
From Fermyn Woods Country Park to Lyveden New Bield

 

Alison Lloyd led a walk between the two sites for people interested in art, landscape, writing, walking and conversation, providing a platform for participant’s contributions and ample opportunity to experience the woodland wildlife.

Participants packs contained timelines of key events and publications in this context, a selection of which follow below:

 

• 1066 – Much of the land was taken into forest law to create a royal hunting forest for William the Conqueror. Under forest law it was an offence for anyone to hunt within the forest boundaries other than the king. This included the landowners, although they could make a payment and be granted a ‘warren’ which would enable them to hunt fox, hare and fowl only. The king also took all rights to grazing, minerals and timber on the land.

• 1793 – 1864 – John Clare, Trespass poem

• 1923 – 1999 – Forestry Commission formed. Further clearance and replanting, mainly with Norwegian Spruce.

• 1967 – “Richard Long took a train out of London, got off where open country began, found an empty field, walked up and down in a straight line till a trodden-down trace appeared in the grass, took a photo of this mark, then went back to town. A black-and-white photo, A Line Made by Walking 1967, was the resulting work.”
  www.richardlong.org

1973 – Joseph Beuys, Save the Woods, a collaborative protest featured in Performance Live Art Since The 1960s by RoseLee Goldberg

1988 – “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi Desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500km, we met in the middle and said good-bye”
Marina Abramovich, Great Wall of China featuredin Marina Abramovic, Cleaning the House, Academy Editions

1995 – Into a walk into Nature, Hamish Fulton. “My art acknowledged the element of time, the time of my life”. “Walking into the distance, beyond imagination”
www.hamish-fulton.com

2000 – Launch of the Ancient Woodland Project, which involves the removal of conifer plantations and the restoration of semi-natural woodland with species such as Ash, Oak and Field Maple

2005 – A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Wanderlust, with its ever changing foot note running along the bottom of its pages, both by Rebecca Solnit. “The question, then, is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery”

2010 – The Road North is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they traveled through their homeland in 2010 and 2011.
www.the-road-north.blogspot.com

 
 
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