Royal Society of Edinburgh BP Prize lecture The Art of (Women) Walking: an Embodied Practice Dr Deirdre Heddon Department of Theatre,

Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow 7 June 2010

Report by Jennifer Trueland

Delivering the BP lecture, which celebrates excellence in the arts, Dr Deirdre Heddon took the RSE audience on a journey a journey of many walks. Sharing some of her emerging research, she described how women are using walking in art and performance, an area which traditionally has been considered the realm of men. A specialist in theatre studies and contemporary performance, Deirdre Heddons latest research is nevertheless taking her into the worlds of art history, literature and geography. She is exploring women walking, when it is art or performance. In a fascinating talk, she described how women are making art through walking, whether it be in the heart of the city or the beauty of the countryside. She described how women use what they find while walking to make art whether it be taking photographs of found objects, seeking out nature in unexpected places or even using knitting as a means towards artistic discourse. Think of walking and art and male names come to mind, she says. For example, Richard Long, who has based several works round walks he has taken, perhaps most memorably 1967s A Line Made Walking. In her previous work, Autobiography and Performance (2008), Dr Heddon wrote about performance and walking, but was struck by womens relative invisibility. Together with Dr Cathy Turner (a woman artist who walks), she has set out to redress that balance by seeking out instances of women using walking in their art. The idea was not so much to explore women walking, or, indeed, female artists who happen to walk. Instead, it was specifically to look at women who use walking in their art, or walking as artistic practice as defined by the women themselves. If the history of walking and art is almost exclusively male, it has been popular through several movements, albeit for different reasons. The naturalists and romantics for example, Rousseau and Thoreau enjoy the wildness of the landscape; for them, walking is about getting back to nature and leaving the civilised world behind. The avant-gardists, on the other hand, seek adventure in the day-to-day surroundings of the city. She quoted Rousseau saying that he only meditates while walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. Henry Thoreau took that further, saying: If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.

Walking, then, was seen by these men as a throwing off of society and its obligations and a moving away from the world, the world inhabited by women. Woman is, in one sense, left behind in the home by these free men who go walking, but in another sense, she also represents nature (for it is her nature that ties her to the realm of the domestic). Where there is a reversal of the traditional roles such as in Ibsens A Dolls House it seems shocking, Heddon claims. The bad boys of the avant-garde, on the other hand, favour the urban environment; yet they follow a similar path, turning culture into nature. They look for the new in the path welltrodden. As Walter Benjamin has it, to lose oneself in a city as one loses oneself in a forest takes some schooling: Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Situationist International member Guy Debord agrees, talking of slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitching non-stop and without destination through Paris during a transportation workers strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public. Women who might want to walk in the night-time city, like the Surrealists, however, risked being read as streetwalkers something which has inspired some to take matters into their own hands. There are well-known women walkers, such as Dorothy Wordsworth, but they tend to be in the margins as exceptions and to be excluded from histories of these movements, said Dr Heddon. Recognising a gap in knowledge about women artists using walking, Heddon and Turner advertised on mailing lists, and were impressed with the replies. Some 150 women responded and Heddon and Turner have met up with some of them, walking and talking to them about their art. Heddon described some of these encounters. Rachel Gomme, for example, has focused on found flowers, which she picks up as she walks the streets. Drifting is how she walks, so we drift through Peckham in a response to the urban landscape. Gomme also made a performance, Undergrowth, which drew attention to weeds growing in unexpected places, usually unnoticed; and performed Ravel walking while knitting, incorporating items found en route into her knitting and hearing stories shared by others intrigued to see a woman walking and knitting. Another walking artist, Linda Cracknell, challenges herself with long walks as a woman walking alone, she tends to attract notice, unlike a man in the same circumstances. Misha Myers 2007 work, Yodel Rodeo, involved bringing together a group of line dancers to walk around the old city walls of Exeter. Other projects described pairing walkers in different places, both across Britain and over the Atlantic; while yet another involves looking for the unexpected a perfect allotment style garden in front of a block of flats, for example. Many of these women challenge Debords notion that somehow there is something limiting about a life lived in a particular locale. Debord tells of a female student who basically walks in a triangle that encompasses the school of political science, her home and that of her piano teacher. Debord displayed outrage at such a pathetically limited life, using it as an example to prove the necessity of developing derives (or drifts). The group Walk Walk Walk, Heddon says, respond to Debord by creating an anti-derive, walking only familiar paths, recognising a splendour and value in everyday walks. The women artists that Heddon and Turner catch up with walk everywhere, town and country, home and abroad. Sometimes the walk itself makes the art. Tamara Ashley and Simone Kenyon, in The Pennine Way: The Legs that Make Us (2007), walk as dancers,

paying close attention to how their bodies feel at every stage of the 270 mile journey. The whole process takes on a certain simplicity, however, because whatever happens, their focus is getting up the next day and getting on the trail. One cannot easily essentialise the women Heddon and Turner have walked with each has her own agenda and motivation; there is no single practice of walking for women or for men. But there is much to explore such as scale of walking, cultural values, motivations and sociological issues, as well as those directly related to gender. We need to rethink what we see as adventure says Dr Heddon we might even have to scale it down but that doesnt mean it is not adventure. Questions Questions ranged from the purely geographical to the definition of art. Asked where the first pictures in her presentation had been taken, Dr Heddon explained that it was in Beer, Devon a seaside walk chosen by Turner precisely because it was pretty. One questioner wanted to know the difference between walking with awareness and art. Dr Heddon said it depended on how it was framed. Her research centres on women who use walking in their art or performance, not simply going for a walk unless that itself is framed as a performance. Essentially, she goes with the definition provided by the women artists if they say what they are doing is art, it is. Vote of Thanks Dr Heddon had led us through a magical landscape, said Professor Jan MacDonald, who also gave an insight into the speakers own love of walking. For her 40th birthday, Heddon has organised 40 walks with 40 friends. Whether that equates to performance was not discussed.

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