(Image – ‘The Changeling’ – © Sarah Wishart 2012)
Deep in Hackney one night, discussing my route home from work, (as Londoners are want to do) I mentioned to a friend that I cycled most nights through London Fields in East London. His response surprised me. He said that a girlfriend living close to the park had warned him, never to walk through it alone, let alone at night. When I pressed him as to why she felt this – he was unable to provide any anecdotal evidence to back up her fears. Nothing had ever happened to her or anyone she knew. The Here be Monsters project emerged from my interest in places that have a similarly (potentially unwarranted) dangerous reputation. I asked a cross section of colleagues to suggest the London spaces they considered dangerous. Many of the resulting spaces were bustling with different cultures and classes, and included Hackney, Brixton and the area around the Elephant & Castle. These suggestions can be seen to be uncovering the fear/threat of the other who is silently, and perhaps always already, raced. The process revealed geographies of fear and inscribed imagined monsters within these maps. It suggested once again that there is an assumption that the unknown space (the crucially other-ed space) is something to be terrified of.
This geography of fear resonates with me. I was a participating artist with the DIY III project funded by the Live Art Development Agency and Artsadmin, the culmination of two days work-shopping in Toynbee Studios, led by Mark Hunter. This project, as with all the DIY projects, aims to stimulate artists into making work through different inspirations and methodologies. Hunter’s project directed all participants out into London to deliberately get lost. I partially recorded my journey with a mini-disc and was amazed to discover how much of the journey was coloured by my ebbing and flowing sense of fear. Along a desolate and vulnerable stretch of the Thames, my breath rans ragged and short. Much later, (after I’d broken the minidisc fumbling for its controls again when nervous because I was walking in an unknown area of Lewisham), when I finally reached my destination of Nunhead cemetery, I was absolutely convinced I was about to be murdered by a stranger I saw lurking in the undergrowth. Dee Heddon spoke about her research on ‘Performing Forests’ at PSi#14 in Copenhagen in 2008 and her discussion on fear resonated with my experience and made me want to explore it within an urban setting further. This has also been fed by my being attacked by a man with a razor blade in London Fields in summer 2008. The space no longer had an unwarranted dangerous reputation for me, yet more than ever, I now wanted to find the ways in which I might ‘unfrighten’ the space.
Although photography is the main focus of Here Be Monsters the process behind the work is framed within the walking practice of a woman in a city. In order to find the subjects for these large format photographs, I devised walks through areas of London from some of the locations suggested to me in my discussions, and would find that I’d often walk through two or three suggested areas in the course of one walk. The walks were documented in three ways.
The first aim and method was common to all three – documentation by photography. I used a medium format half frame camera, which enabled me to catalogue each walk thoroughly. My initial methodology for the photographs was to take a photo every single time I felt anxious or fearful. From these photos I then applied the larger remit of the Here Be Monsters show in choosing which ones become large-scale format photos.
The second form of documentation was by sound recording of the walk. My two choices were to either record the whole walk and edit post-production stage, or to make a decision about when the recordings will start and stop. I aimed to try each method out on a separate walk.
The third form of documentation will be the written responses to place formed through analysis of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. From analysis of this text, I will formulate a methodology of response to the urban space, as Shepherd has done to the Grampian subject of this book. Concerned with attempting to share her experiences of solitary exploration of this range of Scottish mountains through language, I attempt to break down her methodology and mirror it within the experiences of a solitary exploration of an area of London.
Pre-experiment walk.
In October 2008, I set out to walk from Hackney through London Fields, along the Regents Canal, over the top of the tunnel under Angel, through the backstreets of Angel back onto the canal, through Kings Cross and straight through the centre of London over Waterloo Bridge, through the Cut, down to the Elephant and Castle. A walk of approximately 9 miles and took 7 hours. As I didn’t know the area, fellow Here Be Monsters artist Nick Middleton accompanied me. I took photos along the way at points I thought I might have felt nervous being alone. The walk was exhausting and we discovered some really interesting locations along the way that might well have made for great large-format shots for the HBM show. However, the practice felt false. I wasn’t taking shots of moments or spaces where I was anxious – but rather ones where I thought I might feel anxious. The longer the day went on and the more we moved into familiar spaces, the less I felt the photos were relevant. This experience though flagged up the need for a thought through methodology and the necessity to walk alone. I decided I’d need to do the walk again, alone, which I did in June
Thoughts on the practice
It does seem a strange thing to do when I’m such an anxious person anyway to actually set out to scare myself repeatedly over a walk. My writing on this practice over the next six months as we try and get the show together, will try and contextualise this practice and alongside that attempt to be objective on the practice and the experience, and as a way to document this walking practice, all materials will be uploaded here and investigated further. Although this is not necessarily at this stage, a feminist performance – gender looks to be playing a significant role in my experience and in the experiential event of the city. Nan Shepherd’s experience of the Caingorms was a deeply sensual one – she was ‘a fierce looker’ and swam in lochs, ate produce scrubbed from the land – and lived up in the mountains for long periods of time. Whilst I want to absorb Shepherd’s methods of looking and experiencing – the city lived through the body will be a different exchange. Robert Macfarlane‘s article on Shepherd in the Guardian in August 2008 expands further on this idea;
It is Shepherd’s belief in what might be called “bodily thinking” that gives The Living Mountain its contemporary relevance. For more and more of us experience less and less contact with the world. We have increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are, literally, losing touch”.
