Tag Archives: sense of place

Laroche a.k.a. Luce Choules talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Coming to the final day of the Walking Art and Relational Geographies conference (2024) that has included a walk from the city of Girona to where we are now in Banyoles, Andrew Stuck is with visual artist and writer, Laroche a.k.a. Luce Choules. They have just given the keynote this morning, a performance lecture, as they call it, described in the conference programme as ‘Material Fields: surveys, mappings and counter-cartographies’ – a live performance using a format of projected imagery and narrated script to invite an audience on a poetic journey across the natural, managed and urban territories of Europe and beyond. 

In our conversation we discuss Laroche’s interest in fieldwork and how they have established a network of fellow thinkers to explore ‘fieldwork as research and art form’, as well as how they compose their performance lectures. 

24’23” 11.4MB

Download notes of items mentioned in this episode:

Laroche_aka_Luce_Choules podcast_notesDownload

Pau Cata talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Pau Cata presented at the Walking Arts and Relational Geographies conference, held in Girona, Catalonia, in July 2024. After his talk, they set off together on a slow walk through the city’s historic streets — partly in search of somewhere to pause, where Pau could enjoy a beer and Andrew a coffee.

Pau is a walking historian, researcher, and curator whose practice bridges art, geography, and cultural mobility. He has coordinated several significant initiatives, including the Center for Research and Creativity Casamaleas (CeRCCa), North Africa Cultural Mobility Map (NACMM), and the HARAKAT Platform. Over the past decade, he has developed an extensive body of research in Morocco and across parts of North and Saharan Africa, focusing on mapping and documenting artist residencies and creative networks that have often been overlooked or underrepresented in Western art discourses.

His work seeks to understand alternative, non-Western approaches to creativity and exchange — exploring how movement, migration, and collaboration shape artistic practice. Through a mixture of happenstance and deep engagement with place, Pau has also participated in collaborative research along trans-Saharan trade routes — journeys that, fittingly, have frequently unfolded on foot.

Since 2020, his ongoing inquiries have been framed withinthe Art Residency Research Collective (ARRc) , where he continues to investigate residencies as spaces of encounter, knowledge exchange, and relational geography.

26’08” 12.3MB

Pau_Cata_podcast_notesDownload

Emma Cunis talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

After 20 years of corporate life, international travel, and living overseas, Emma Cunis had been diagnosed with ME Chronic Fatigue.  She returned to Dartmoor where she had grown up as a child and slowly but surely walked herself back to better health.  She subsequently set up  a guiding business that she calls “Dartmoor’s Daughter”, helping others on their personal transformative journeys through getting closer to nature.

Living in London without a car, as Andrew Stuck does, getting to Dartmoor in the far south west of England, to undertake an interview, was challenging, so Emma and he agreed to record the interview on a Zoom call.

He is intrigued by her choice of “Dartmoor’s Daughter” as a business name, and how she makes a living as a walking professional, but he is also interested in what aspects of corporate life she has been able to apply as well as what aspects of walking she feels would benefit those in the corporate world.

28’39” 13.4MB

Download notes from this interview:

Emma_Cunis_podcast_notesDownload
Stone circle in ancient Dartmoor
Foraging and dowsing in ancient Dartmoor

Rachel Epp Buller talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Rachel Epp Buller is an inter-disciplinary artist based in Kansas in the United States. She is the recipient of two Fulbright scholarships, the latest of which she went to wintry Edmonton in north west Canada to make a piece of walking art called “One Hundred Days of Walking”. Her piece has now been shortlisted for the inaugural Marŝarto Award for Walking Art.

Andrew Stuck and Rachel talk over the Internet on a Zoom call about the importance to her of using different media to create work, including embroidery, bookmaking, and recording the sounds of the environment through which she walks.  They also discuss how she maintained her discipline throughout the 100 days by keeping to a ‘walking score’, and how she has exhibited the work.

The interview opens with Andrew asking Rachel to explain a little bit about the Fulbright scholarship programme. 18’11” 8.5MB

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview:

Rachel_Epp_Buller_podcast_notesDownload

Images from One Hundred Days of Walking, 2022, an installation of 100 accordion books, cotton, and vinyl (one full installation view and one detail).

Emma Jackson talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

It’s a sunny summer’s day and Andrew Stuck is on the Waterlink Way, a green route for cyclists and pedestrians that follows the valley of the rivers, Ravensbourne, Pool and Quaggy, flowing south to north through the London Borough of Lewisham.

Andrew is in the company of Emma Jackson, an urban sociologist at Goldsmith’s, University of London and the Director of the Centre of Urban and Community Research, as she tells him about how she uses walking in her research and in teaching her students. They talk about the research centre and how she herself studied there, as well as what urban sociologists do in general, and specifically, when the pandemic restricted their explorations.

Emma is keen to impress on how every walk is different, even if you’re following a familiar route, as the Waterlink Way is to both of us.  As if to endorse what she is saying, something unusual does occur. 22’52” 10.7MB

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview with Emma Jackson:

Emma_Jackson_podcast_notes_Download
River Ravensbourne
A collage from a workshops with people by the river.
Fly tipping on the river bank

Graeme Miller talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Twenty radio transmitters were concealed along a three-mile route beside the M11 / A12 link road in east London by artist Graeme Miller, who in 2003 created a trail of sound that celebrated the everyday lives of the householders whose homes were destroyed along the route when the motorway link was built. Unusually for a Talking Walking interview, Andrew Stuck is sitting with Graeme Miller, rather than accompanying him on a walk. It is a weekend in September, at which “LINKED”, a work he made almost 20 years ago, is being reprised, and he is having to man a kiosk on a roundabout, from which he is handing out radio receivers. As will be revealed in the following conversation, Graeme creates work in which “listener walkers” become the performers. 22’18” 10.5MB

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview:

Graeme_Miller_podcast_notesDownload
Credit: Graeme Miller
Credit: Graeme Miller
Credit: Graeme Miller

Julius Smit talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

As a former specialist photographer in an academic library, Julius Smit has always been fascinated by the composition of words and pictures. Through a series of walks on the South Downs and in and around Eastbourne where he now lives, Julius has been publishing ‘zines and chapbooks of his poetry and photography, that he has printed and gives away to people he meets on his walks. Andrew Stuck meets him early on a February morning, to walk along the promenade in Eastbourne, and discuss the process Julius follows to create his ‘zines, and how he views his efforts as a way to resist the digital world and encourage us all to slow down. 29’51” 14 MB

Julius Smit

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview with Julius Smit:

Julius_Smit_podcast_notes_Download

Eye-Glass Zine covers created by Julius Smit:

Clara Gari talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Andrew Stuck is in Olot, Catalunya, in the company of Clara Gari, the founder of the Nau Côclea Contemporary Art centre and of The Grand Tour, an annual nomadic walking art residency that Clara has developed over the last eight years.  Previously having received public funding to run a conventional art centre offering exhibitions, workshops and talks, a political change meant the funding was withdrawn, and Clara struggled to keep the art centre alive.  Thinking out of the box, she reprised a personal walking journey she had made in 2003, in which she walked for three weeks on a 200 kilometre route that linked artists and friends, to create what she called The Grand Tour that now follows a spiral route through eastern Catalunya and the Pyrenees. 22’23″ 10.5MB

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview:

Clara_Gari_podcast_notes_Download

Jez Hastings talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

On a hot summer’s day at a walking conference in Girona, Catalunya, Andrew Stuck is accompanying self-styled photo troubadour, Jez Hastings on a short stroll.  Jez has been known to walk to similar conferences, including a walk through Italy, Albania and Macedonia to reach a gathering in Prespas – walking long distances is in his blood.  They talk about why that is so, and how and why Jez has developed his practice of ‘a pace of purpose without purpose’, of making art through experiencing landscapes on durational walks, and in taking fewer photographs…27’31” 12.9MB

Download notes from this interview with:

Jez_Hastings_podcast_notesDownload

Image credits: Feature portrait: F.Tanguy Landscape: J.Hastings

Alex Middleton talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Andrew Stuck is in the company of Alex Middleton, one of the creators of Vespucci Adventures, that encourages people to put away their smart phones, to walk in the ‘great outdoors’.  He has come to Greenwich to walk around Andrew’s local neighbourhood and talk about how he and his co-founder have worked tirelessly over the last five years to build a business around a shared passion for walking.  It may be a passion, but as yet, it is not a profitable business.  The COVID pandemic brought trials but let them also develop the business in other ways, and Alex tells us what their plans are for the next five years, as well as offering some candid advice to anyone considering turning their walking passion into a business.  26’44” 12.5MB

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview with Alex_MiddletonDownload

Charlie Lee Potter talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Charlie Lee Potter has had a lifelong passion for working with sound especially in creatively weaving soundscapes to evoke places. As a former BBC radio journalist and foreign correspondent, she knows how the sound of a place helps to tell complicated stories and has applied this to a fascinating series of podcasts recorded on walks called “Inside a Mountain”. However there is a lot more to Charlie than just working with sound, as Andrew Stuck discovers on the walk they take across Christchurch Meadows in Oxford. 25’50” 12.1MB

Inside a Mountain podcast art
Ridge & Furrow artwork
Ridge & Furrow artwork

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview with:

Charlie_Lee_Potter_podcast_notesDownload

Quintin Lake talking walking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Photographer Quintin Lake set himself a daunting challenge, to walk and photograph the coastline of Great Britain.  It is turning into an 8-year project, as he is now editing hundreds of photographs he has taken on the coastal walks, around what he has aptly called ‘The Perimeter’. Andrew Stuck catches up with him on a bright and breezy day along the Cotswold Way, a favourite local walk of Quintin’s. Although Quintin has spent five years solitarily walking, which he describes as ‘oneliness’, he is great company, and he tells Andrew about why walking and photography are so integral to his life,  and how there is a kind of creative magic in walking more and photographing less.  26’02” 12.2MB

Approaching Skegness, March 2020
Happy camper, Port an t-Salainn, Point of Knap, Argyll & Bute, Scotland.
Quintin Lake
Image: Tom Martin

Feature and portrait image: Tom Martin, all others: Quintin Lake

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview with Quintin Lake

Quintin_Lake_podcast_notesDownload