Welcome to the Australian Walking Artists

Alex explores notions of place through site-responsive creative methodologies. This post-landscape work moves toward an alternative view of place that communicates my personal entanglements with site, emphasising sensual discovery through embodied presence.

Walking enables a personal conversation of observation and awareness, as I visually and mentally document the subtle and not so subtle changes with my environment. It informs my artwork, whether it is walking in rainforest, open forests, streets, beaches, mountains, along rivers or looking for wildflowers in the Wallum heathland.

My experimental drawing practice explores forms of thinking, feeling and knowing. I walk at night, drawing with both hands; I am a human seismograph. The marks I make are unmediated, an affirmation of my sensorial attentiveness and presence in my world. I develop larger drawings in my studio that reference my walking drawings.

Interested in notions of fieldwalking, my steps have been guided by multiple beings and ecologies. I have taken people on walks—and people have taken me on favourite walks—I have shared fieldwork with scientists, 'followed the water' downhill, rambled on uneven ground, along river paths, and ‘til I have run out of water.

Walking is a central part of my daily life and research process. I walk as a way of entering into a conversation with the complexities of the places I live, work, and pass through. I examine the possibilities of walking through deep mapping workshops, writing, teaching, and audio work.

Walking is ground. Walking is method. Walking is metaphor. Walking is knowledge. Each step opens knowing—bodies, selves, languages, environments.
I listen. I note. I photograph. I return, arrange, shape—books made of movement. Now my 23rd, Shared Path, at Barrett House. I write daily, an open-book Lexicon on Walking.