Walking-Marking

This ongoing project investigates the bodily experience of the passage of time and raises questions about presence, permanence, the meaning of a life's work, and the call to attentive awareness. It explores the traces (physical, energetic and memory-based) left by the body; the activation of space through physical and mental attention and intention; and the quality of physical presence composed of both present and historical energetic traces. It highlights the ability of simple acts of walking and marking to make and unmake spaces, and to facilitate the active attention which is the precursor for connection.

Walking Marking 1 was performed in Johnson, VT in 2009. For 24 days, I walked back and forth between two walls, making a graphite mark on each wall each time she arrived at it. My labor evolved into two drawings: 1) two wall drawings each made of rows composed of 9,441 graphite hatch marks and 2) a band-like floor drawing made as my continual footsteps burnished the floor. Later, video of the performance was projected onto a bridge under construction nearby, enacting a new drawing onto the bridge, and layering the private cultural labor of my performance onto the public manual labor of the S.D. Ireland Concrete Company.

Walking Marking 2 was performed over five weeks on the proscenium in a gallery's storefront window in 2010. Performed by 25 guest performers and myself, this iteration focused particularly on the dynamics of multiple energies making and sharing the space, especially vis-a-vis collaboration/exchange with pedestrian passersby on the sidewalk abreast of the performance space. Two wall drawings were made on 7' scrolls hung on opposite sides of the proscenium.



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