In December 2024, DRAW Space will present Group Show / WALK WITH ME, an exhibition by eight artist-researchers who use walking as a deliberate strategy to reveal and disseminate new knowledge.
The exhibition will open at 6pm on Thursday 28 November. Join the artists and DRAW Space team to celebrate.
Once the primary mode of transport, part of the continuum of human history, walking in the First World is now consciously chosen, an act of resistance against loss of time, space and embodiment. Since the 1960s, when art transitioned from object-making to an investigation of ideas, valuing process over product, opportunities arose for the artist to see the body as a medium and walking as an ordinary activity from which the extraordinary can be derived.
Curated by walking artist, Melinda Hunt, WALK WITH ME will present six projects that foreground preoccupations with and responses to habitat loss and species extinction, connection with urban ecologies, the colonial project, artistic and scientific activity centred on walking, and site-specific atmospheres, among other concerns. Each project generates drawing as an output. To find out more about individual projects, read the artist statements below.
WALK WITH ME includes an exciting public program of walking events and activities during which participants are invited to join the artists in exploring surrounding suburbs on foot and contribute drawings to the exhibition.
WALK WITH ME features the work of:
- Alexandra Crosby, Ilaria Vanni, and Sarah Jane Jones
- Melinda Hunt
- Luca Idrobo
- Linda Knight
- Kiera O’Toole
- Mia Salsjö
The exhibition runs from 6pm on 28 November to 5pm on Sunday 22 December.
For the exhibition WALK WITH ME, Alexandra Crosby and Ilaria Vanni and Sarah Jane Jones have created three ‘photo diagrams’ researched through walking ethnographies of Sydney Park.
Alexandra Crosby and Ilaria Vanni have worked together as Mapping Edges for over a decade. They combine walking and mapping methodologies to guide people to connect with their neighbourhood ecologies. In this project, they work with award-winning visual communication design researcher Sarah Jane Jones to map the water trajectories intersecting in Sydney Park’s constructed wetlands and visualise them as a working landscape.
Photo diagrams are a technique to move between photography as descriptive documentation and documentation of non-representational dimensions. They can bring a visual communication perspective into debates on conveying the non-representational in visual form, and in this way contribute to making wetlands legible in urban environments.
During the exhibition, Crosby, Vanni and Jones will lead a public walk entitled Water Walk. Over 2 hours, participants will trace the movement of water under the surrounding suburbs concluding at Sydney Park. Registration will be required for a maximum of 12 people.
urbanwetlands.online 