The Walk is a Heartbeat: Terminalia Festival

Posted on: January 30th, 2024

The Walk is a Heartbeat

The walk takes place as part of Terminalia Festival

It is also the final walk in the year long project Walking Beyond Words. The physical location is London, or you can walk wherever you are.

for more info and to register please email: info@sallystenton.com. Please state whether you will be walking in your own location or joining the group walk.

Date: Sunday 25th February 2024

Time: 2pm

Duration: One hour (approx.)

Meeting point: Rembrandt Gardens, Little Venice. W2 1XB. Nearest tube Warwick Road

End point: Primrose Hill

The Grand Union Canal is the artery feeding this walk. We listen for hearts that resonate with ours, developing receptors that can detect unhuman beats in this city landscape. Each heartbeat is an opening for new possibilities.

You may join the communal walk in London or walk wherever you are in the world. There is no digital communication with people in other locations during the walk, but we walk knowing that others elsewhere are walking with the same words. You have the option to send words in response to the walks if you wish. The words will be collaged together as a fusion of our experiences.

Starting in Little Venice and walking to Primrose Hill the group walk will follow a waterway which once upon a time fed the capital in numerous ways.  Nestled in and weaving though the urban landscape the canal is a conduit for life-giving minerals, micro-organisms, nutrients that blend into our being. We pass historic homes and modern industrial architecture that has been crafted from the earth. When the canal disappears underground, we walk above it through the city bustle and join the myriad chorus of heartbeats. In Regents Park we disperse for a time of attentive walking and re-gather before the assent to Primrose Hill to gaze back over the city.

The Walk marks both the end of the project Walking beyond words and the potential for the rhythm of its beat to morph into new walks and happenings. The 52 weekly walks have been exploring our smallness and the interconnectedness of everything. The prompts suggest that the walk itself has agency, tipping the human presence off centre and blending us with the wider ecology. Every week people’s responses from across the globe have been fused together and the 52 word collages will be compiled into a publication. Participants in this Walk no. 52 will have the opportunity to contribute to the final word collage.

Caroline L. A. Wheeler created this prompt and is co-facilitating the walk with Sally Stenton.

Walking beyond words is co-ordinated by Aya Hastwell and Sally Stenton, in association with Experimental Space Collective [esc]. Weekly prompts and word collages are contributed by participants.

How to register

There are 2 ways of participating in this walk. Please indicate whether you would like to take part in the group walk in London or walk in your own location.

Email: info@sallystenton.com

The Walk is Not a LINE

Posted on: January 11th, 2024

The Walk is Not a LINE

The walk formed part of the Art Language Location TEN:th anniversary celebrations in October 2023

It dovetailed with the year long project ‘Walking Beyond Words’ which enabled people to walk in Cambridge at the same time as people in other locations, including Bombay and Delhi and other parts of the UK.

…a fleeting adherence to trees

Posted on: October 27th, 2022

…a fleeting adherence to trees

 

 

in collaboration with the ceramicist Sandy Layton

 

Layered image and writing 2021

 

Experiments with the projection of ceramic sculpture onto trees and grass, writing in response, mixing our lines, our media and our intentions.

                                        Wood catching light or light catching wood?

Knotted holes in trees

 

                 An appropriation of surface for other means

                                                               Punctured surfaces

 

Bandages binding

                                   illuminating the textures and contours of a body.

 

                                    Eerie lurking shadow forms

                                               Human cracks and crevices emerge from clay and bark

                                                                                                              Engulfing blackness

 

 

                                                Dragging attention to unknowing

 

Severed by a dark shadow

                                             The computer grapples with what it sees and offers alt text:

 

                                                                                                                 Blood red descending

 

                                             A picture containing dark, a hand holding a turtle

 

                                             Haunting black shadows

 

 

      In the night the infra-red detects ceramic creatures hiding between the branches

Hollow empty eye socket

                                                                                          Liberated objects flying free

 

And merging with the messy earth.

 

 

                               Pointed toothless jaw

 

 

 

                              It is only a fleeting adherence to trees

An audio guide for the complacent walker

Posted on: November 3rd, 2020

An audio guide for the complacent walker

September 2020

Audio file 

[original version]

Featured in the 2021 Royal College of Art Research Biennale

Modified version

Performed at ArtSpace, Cambridge on 11th September 2022

and you sounds

Posted on: September 22nd, 2020

and you sounds

is an audio piece that you are invited to take for a walk. It has emerged from an ongoing walking collaboration between Jo Miller and Sally Stenton.

We walked together at a distance, about 12 miles apart.

Sounds from our walks mingled, crossing the edges of our digital devices.

The next day we wrote down memories that surfaced, then scrambled the words until we were left with fragments of a walk that we took with us on a walk.

Words fall off the page.

We make the words into sounds about sounds.

You might play the audio at the beginning of a familiar walk and when the recording ends allow the other sounds around you to fill the sound space.

 

and you sounds

Audio file

Mars by proxy

Posted on: August 22nd, 2019

I received a request to create a giant circle in the sand at Hunstanton to represent Mars and to send a photograph to Tony Wade. The photo was featured as part of an artwork entitled ‘Relative’.

https://tonywadeart.wordpress.com/2019/07/09/relative/.

This is featured as part of The Festival of the Moon at Wakefield Market Hall. August/Sept 2019

Mars by Proxy – Circle created by Sally Stenton and Chris Griffiths following request by Tony Wade. Photograph by Chris Stenton

Portfolio 2015 to 2019

Posted on: April 15th, 2019

Portfolio

Selected images and projects 2015 to 2019

Please click on the red arrows above to scroll between pages.

For additional related images and information about each project click more… at the foot of each page

 

 

 

 

 

Facing image: Back tracking with blue thread  2018

Residue from Experiment no. 2,  during a residency at Joya: AiR, Spain. Walking in a straight line as far as the thread will allow, returning with a different attention.

Photo: Sally Stenton

more… click here for related images

Sand Castles  2015

Images of installation on Hunstanton beach, Norfolk

Laptop computers, keyboards and leads

The documentation became a series of works. The slick digital photographs in dialogue with pinhole images of the digital devices.

Photos: Sally Stenton

more…

Plan for an exhibition of digital gestures  2015

Ruskin Gallery Project Space, Cambridge

Site specific installation

4 channel video, monitors, electrical tape, transfer lettering with instructions to fold the corridor into a white cube.

Photo (left): Chris Stenton

Photo (right): Sally Stenton

more…

Text vb. 2015

Site specific video installation

The Bridge Chapel, St. Ives

Created for Art Language Location

A number and word association game played via text. The face is illuminated via the screen and the animated facial response to a series of numbers captured on a phone is all that is seen by passers-by.

Prize awarded by Anglia Ruskin University

 

Photo: Sally Stenton

more…

The Listening Stick  2016 and 2018

Participatory performance in collaboration with Judy Nakazato

for Landscape in imagination and the virtual future conference at The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 2016

Re-enacted for Liquid Land at The Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, 2018

Re-voicing conflicting responses to the excavation in 1999 of a bronze-age timber circle and central upturned tree stump from the Norfolk coast.

Photo: Julie Sleaford

more…

“The performance of The Listening Stick was magical.  It is a performance piece that is not only sensually rich, but uses this richness to draw the audience into a deeper experience of unity and diversity.”   Julian Smith, Architect and educator. Wiilowbank Centre for Cultural Landscape, Canada

“Working on this project was an extremely rewarding experience which led down many unexpected pathways.  It was intellectually exciting and broadening while also being, at times, a very deep experience.  I would be very keen to collaborate with an artist again, and would encourage others to try it.”  Ann Copestake, Professor of Computing, University of Cambridge

“The transition from the descriptive language used to explain each place into the personal perspective was really successful in making me question which place I found myself in, with elements resonating with the place in which I physically found myself in and at other times with the place I imagined.  It was very powerful.” Extract from an email from a participant in the walk

Stone Paper Cloud  2016

For Art Language Location and Cambridge Festival of Ideas

In association with Professor Ann Copestake (Computational Linguist) and Dr, Augusta McMahon (Archaeologist)

The search for a bronze age tablet on its digital namesake threatened to prise open the bullet proof window of the screen. The virtual arrow pointed to Aleppo, but the tablet had gone missing. This project with its multi-layers of time and place encompassed the treading of clay in the courtyard of Cambridge University’s Computer Lab and a walk from Archaeology to Computer Science with portals connecting to an uncannily similar route in Aleppo.

Award from Cambridge Festival of Ideas

Photo and postcard design: Sally Stenton

Link to the project site for more…

An Invitation to Travel  2017

A 4 part project in conjunction with Caroline Wendling. A series of journeys developed with groups of different ages; in the town, in nature and on the water.

Supported by Arts Council England, Cambridgeshire County Council,  St. Ives Town Team and Wysing Arts Centre.

Image of Journey Flag,  Sally Stenton 2017

On the flag are the shapes of peoples’ journeys to St.Ives, Cambridgeshire. I worked with 11 people in their 80s and 90s, 5 of whom had travelled to St. Ives from abroad and only one was born in the town.  The flag was hoisted up the flagpole above the entrance to an estate agents in the market square for a week. It marked the information point for Bridge Walk: A treasure hunt through memory and place.

Small groups formed and navigated their way with a set of cryptic visual clues in search of peoples stories.  A large number of passers-by changed their trajectory to join the memory hunt.

 

Photo: Jason Archontides

Link to project site for more…

Tripping over digital objects  2018

Explorative work with photography, projection, installation, metalwork and paper during a placement at Anglia Ruskin University as part of the Artist Access to Art College scheme (AA2A).

 

Photo: Sally Stenton

link to AA2A site for more…

If the cloud allows 2018

We walked in a circle in two places, treading on the earth and gazing at the same moon.  Basra, Iraq and Cambridge, UK.

In association with Dr. Nawrast Sabah Abd Alwahab in Basra, Dr Matthew Bothwell from the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy and film maker Mohammedali Albatat.

more…

The work was commissioned for ‘The Archive and Contested Landscape’.

“A textured, thought-provoking and complex project realised in beautiful simplicity.”  Shreepali Patel, Director of Story Lab Research Institute

“If the cloud allows is a thoroughly coherent and well executed project.”  Chris Owen, Head of Cambridge School of Art

Postcards written after the walk:

“The moon circle was gathering us, and this beautiful chance. But the humanity and this experience are what connect us.”  (Translated from Arabic)

“Earth beneath my feet, beneath your feet. The moon above, for you, for me. An enduring connection.”

Photo (left): Mohammedali Albatat

Photo (right): Chris Stenton

Bending and Benign  2018 – 2019

Photo series in collaboration with Chris Stenton

The series began with the creation of a poster for a workshop that I co-ran entitled ‘Bending as a form of resistance‘ taking Antonio Negri’s play ‘The Bent Man’ as its starting point. It continued during the residency at Joya:AiR as I walked and bent into the landscape.

The next series will explore the body in derelict sites where nature is reclaiming the land.

Image: Bending and Benign Series 1, Image 2

Photo: Chris Stenton

Click here for Joya:AiR blog

more...

Bending and Benign Series

Posted on: December 23rd, 2018

Bending and Benign:

I step into the image of the landscape as spectator and then, feet sinking into the clay, thorns draw faint lines on my arms and ankles.

Loose rocks unsettle the body and the environment begins to absorb me.

I press against trees, lie on the earth, drape my body over rocks and assume the shapes of the land.

The photographer, caught between landscape and portrait, conspires with the imitation, losing the false sense of where the human body ends and nature begins.

Joya:AiR Residency Nov/Dec 2018

Photography by Chris Stenton

Plan for an exhibition of digital gestures

Posted on: February 17th, 2017

Plan for an exhibition of digital gestures

 

Site specific installation

Project Space – Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge.

4 monitors, 2 walls, electrical tape, 4 channel video, vinyl lettering with instructions to fold the corridor into a cube.

2015

Plan for low res

Offline

Posted on: February 17th, 2017

Offline

 

 

Sculptural gestures and installations 2014