Recovering the Walkabout

Kim Tanzer | August 31, 2023for MAHB

“By singing the world into existence, [Arkady] said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning ‘creation’.  No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect.  His religious life had a single aim:  to keep the land the way it was and should be.  The man who went ‘Walkabout’ was making a ritual journey.  He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor.  He sang the Ancestors’ stanzas without changing a word or note—and so recreated the Creation.”
∼ Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

One thread running through much of my work is the intention to sing a preferred world into being through the act of walking. I have always loved walking: It keeps me physically and emotionally healthy, allows my mind to wander, and reduces my CO2 production when I walk rather than drive. It allows me to see the world at the pace prescribed by our human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. It slows the world down. It engages my attention.

It is no wonder walking is integral to my art.  While I am inspired by the canonical walkers—Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, and others—I seek to replace objectivity, procedural neutrality, even aesthetic cynicism, with awe and inspiration.  I walk to absorb beauty through my senses, to retrace it with my feet, to share it through works I produce.  In so doing, I fortify myself, praise our Earth, and hope to inspire others.

These are a few examples of my walking practices.

Found drawing after #Duchamp, iPhone photo, created April 14, 2022 at 11:01 AM; posted October 15, 2022

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