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
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
September 2020
[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
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
A giant circle in the sand at Hunstanton to represent Mars. The photo was featured as part of an artwork entitled ‘Relative’ in conjunction with Tony Wade.
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. Photograph by Chris Stenton
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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.
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
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
Loom
Video/Sculpture installation for Cambridge School of Art degree show 2015.
Steel, electrical tape, video editing monitors (1997), swipe gesture (patented by Apple 2013), re-processed video documentary “From Sand to Silicon” (2013)
Loom (detail -video still)
Loom (detail – video still)
Loom 2015
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