The Cartographic Journal Vol. 46 No. 4 pp.

316–322 Art & Cartography Special Issue, November 2009

# The British Cartographic Society 2009

REFEREED PAPER

Walking the Line: Affectively Understanding and

Communicating the Complexity of Place
Laurene Vaughan
Department of Media and Communication, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne, Vic. 3001, Australia
Email: laurene.vaughan@rmit.edu.au

This text discusses the proposition that walking is a particular method of mapping, a method or methodology that is both
an act of mapping and a means for creating mapping outcomes. In particular, I focus on the way that artists and other
creative practitioners engage with these acts of walking and mapping in the realisation of their creative works. The
intention is to explore and consider the complexity of and performative nature of mapping, and the experience and
meaning of such practices on our understanding of place.

Keywords: art, walking, mapping, place, affect, Richard Long

INTRODUCTION significantly different from walking it. To walk is to be in

Warning! The following text is not about cartography, it is,
however, about maps and the practice of mapping. It is not
concerned with notions of universal truth nor is it
concerned with discourses about geospatially correct data.
This text is about practices of place making, place marking
and some of the ways that we artistically connect to space/
place, to other people through the intentional movement of
the body, a movement named walking. I should state in the
beginning that I am neither a cartographer nor a geo-
grapher, but an artist and designer who, founded in a
phenomenological view of the world, is actively seeking a
deeper understanding of the experience of place. It is my
intention to use this space, the pages in this journal, to
consider the proposition that there are many ways that we
mark and record our experience of space and place, and that
walking and the artefacts of particular walks, provide us with
a means to share and convey the particularities of certain
locales. To do this, I am using the terms mapping and map,
as the means and the artefact that we do this through.
Walking is one of the fundamental ways in which we
move through space. The upright human is itself a
representation of advancement and intelligence. It is a
stance that marks both the evolution of our species and the
form of our anatomy (Solnit, 2000, p. 3). In contemporary
life, walking has taken on many meanings. It can be a
political act of protest, a sign of health and fitness or the
manifestation of the luxury of time as evidenced through
wanderings and meanderings along streets, gardens or
mountains. Walking is no longer a necessity nor is it our
primary means of transportation; we can fly, drive or ride at
varying speeds. But to drive across a landscape is
the landscape or a particular location, it is to touch it with
our feet, and experience it through all our senses (Thoreau,
1914; Adams, 2001). As Rebecca Solnit states, ‘Walking
shares with making and working that crucial element of
engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of
knowing the world through the body and the body through
the world’ (2000, p. 29).
In order to explore this relationship between walking,
mapping and creative expression, I am going to explore the
creative practice of the British artist Richard Long and to
position his practice within the sociocultural context of
landscape art. Richard Long has since the earliest days of his
artistic career explored walking as a method of creative
exploration. This has resulted in the production of
numerous artefacts of his walks, including images, maps,
photographs and installations. These artefacts are a means
for him to share with others his experiences and his
particular interpretations of the places he encounters. It is
my intention in this text to explore ways that we navigate
and engage in space through walking in the landscape as a
creative act. To do this, I will critique the works of Richard
Long and consider them in relation to the writings of
philosophers, geographers and cultural theorists who are
also engaged in the discourses of place, walking and
mapping. In this way, it could be argued that this is a
phenomenological exploration of maps of place, topogra-
phy and nature, rather than thematic maps of habitation.
THE PRACTICE OF WALKING
Walking as a practice goes beyond the necessity of moving
the body through space and time, and it spans cultures and

DOI: 10.1179/000870409X12541388437132
Walking the Line
traditions. There are walking meditations, prayers, pil-
grimages, walks for meetings, walks for thinking and walks
for creating. Great teachers such as Aristotle walked as he
delivered his public lectures within his Peripatetic School at
the Lyceum in Ancient Greece, religious practitioners from
the East and the West have used it as a meditative technique
for deeper realisations, and poetically we use the term
‘walking’ as a metaphor for exploring ideas or alternate
perspectives (Vaughan, 2008). Whether it is a physical act
or a metaphor for intellectual transition and the develop-
ment of ideas, walking creates a space for exploration and
for discovery. It is ‘a bodily labour that produces nothing
but thoughts, experiences, arrival’ (Solnit, 2000, p. 5).
The Human Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues that it is
through the navigation of the body through space that we
are able to create awareness and locate ourselves within the
bigger picture, thereby creating place. He argues that ‘when
space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place.
Kinaesthetic and perceptual experience as well as the ability
to form concepts, are required for the change if the space is
large’ (Tuan, 1977, p. 73). Walking is one way that we
manifest this understanding of locale named as space and/
or place. At times, walking as a practice is used as a
manifestation of our desire to connect to specific places
(Thoreau, 1914; Tuan 1977; de Certeau, 1984); at other
times, it is a means to explore randomness and the sensation
of being lost (to lose the sense of place) (Careri, 2002;
Solnit, 2005).
Rebecca Solnit (2000), in her exploration of the
traditions of walking, presents walking as being something
more, or something other, than a means of transport. For
her, walking is an engagement with consciousness that is
connected to rhythm. ‘The rhythm of walking generates a
kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a
landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series
of thoughts’ (Solnit, 2000, pp. 5–6). This reveals about the
power of the rhythm of walking and its potential to free the
mind to be where it is, and through this, it is discovered
what could be noted by many habitual walkers, from the
reflections of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, 1974) who
was an ardent walker and used his wanderings as a means to
explore his reveries to seek answers to the problems that
faced him. For him, it was during his walks that he was able
to ‘give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow
their natural course, unrestricted and unrefined’ (1979, p.
35). In the text In Praise of Walking (1905), each of the
authors, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Burroughs
and William Hazlitt, reflects on this as being a central appeal
of the practice of walking. Walking provides a space
through action for the walker to be where they wander
and in that being, to observe, reflect and discover some-
thing new. The contemporary author Ian Sinclair, has also
become a walker, and even on completion of his London
Orbital project, he found himself setting off on another
walk stating that: ‘You might think a circuit of London,
twelve walks, inside and outside the orbital motorway, the
M25, would have cured my of this neurosis: the compulsion
to be on the hoof, burdened with packs, sketchbooks,
cameras. Future memories’ (2005, p. 5). In this way,
walking is an activity that creates space to both imagine and
experience, at the same time.
317
Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses and
respects the trajectories that it speaks. In the accounts of,
and reflections by, the supporters of walking, there is a
consistent argument for the presence of the narrative of
the landscape (urban and rural). This may be in relation to
the path, the people that are encountered along the way, or
the conversations that occur within our own thoughts and
minds. For example, Henry David Thoreau (1905, 1914)
spends much of his writing reflecting and illuminating on
what we learn from the landscape as move upon it. Even
though we may not literally speak while walking (because
many walkers prefer to walk alone), walking is not a silent
act. All the modalities of the body and the environment sing
a part in the chorus of walking as we shift from step to step:
stepping in or through proportions, sequences and
intensities of experience which vary according to the time,
the path taken and the walker doing the walking (de
Certeau, 1984, p. 99).
Walking enables a personal narrative of the body moving
through space. When considering the practice of walking,
we must also consider the tradition of walking as an
aesthetic and creative practice. Walking is a practice for
transitioning, of moving from here to there, or from this to
that. The act of crossing space stems from the natural
necessity to move, to find food and information that are
required for survival. However, once these basic needs have
been satisfied, walking takes on a symbolic form that has
enabled humans to dwell in the world. By modifying the
sense of space that is being crossed, walking becomes
humankind’s first aesthetic act, penetrating the territories of
chaos, constructing an order on which to develop the
architecture of situated objects (Careri, 2002, p. 20). This is
an aesthetic act of discovery, experience and reflection, of
both the everyday and in relation to the creative arts.
WALKING AND CREATIVE PRACTICE
Francesco Careri’s opening statement within his text
Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (2002)
presents the changes that have facilitated the evolution in
art and creative practice where walking has transcended
from being merely practical to eventually becoming
inspirational, and finally an aesthetic act to itself. The
evolution of walking as both an aesthetic and political
practice has developed across cultures and contexts (Careri,
2002). For example, there are Buddhist garden mediations
(Cooper, 2003), the eighteenth and nineteenth century
romantic artworks inspired by the landscape, the Dada and
Surrealist deambulations in the 1920s (which explored
randomness and walking events in open country towns), or
the Situationist International Lettrist ‘derives’ of the 1950s
(their events included texts and travel guides that were
focused on random foot explorations of the urban
environment).
However, beyond the realm of the arts, Rebecca Solnit
(contemporary academic and author) states that she walks
to think, solve and create too. She believes that ‘walking,
ideally is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world
are aligned’ (Solnit, 2000, p. 5). She says of beginning work
on her book Wanderlust, ‘I sat down one spring day to
318
write about walking and stood up again, because a desk is
no place to think on the large scale’ (Solnit, 2000, p. 4). In
this way, we see walking as part of the act of creation, the
preliminary or ongoing thinking space within another act of
creation, writing. Similar to the idea of the artist’s garden,
such as Monet’s, although the garden space is a creation to
itself, its primary purpose is to inspire and provide subject
matter for another creation. To meander in the external
space is to take respite from the other activities of life and to
have space and time to focus on the work of creation and
creating.
Beyond the perception of walking as an aid to inspiring
creative outcomes, there are also those (such as the
Surrealists, Dadaists and Situationist International) who
perceived the actual engagement with space by walking in
the landscape (city or country), to be an act of creating and
an artistic outcome itself. In this way, the walking and its
interaction with the location was the making or critiquing of
meaning, and it was the art work performed. This act of
creation (like dance or other performances) was temporal and
contextual, and existed while being enacted. The documen-
tation or recording of the creative act was an ‘other’ activity
to that of the walk itself. This is the opposite of the artist’s or
writer’s walk (for example, the daily meanderings of Henry
David Thoreau or Walt Whitman in 1905), where the walk
was used as a source of inspiration and sometimes problem
solving, and where the walk was a preliminary or first phase
within an act of creation. Contrastingly, the walks (named
derives) of artists such as the Situationists (building on the
practices of the Flâneurs, the Dadaist events and Surrealist
deambulations), were used as a narrative method and
methodology for engaging with urban space. These walks
were a political response to the evolving modern landscape,
the city and the industrialisation of life (Careri, 2002;
Bassett, 2004). Much has been written on the practices and
intents of these groups and their radical spatialized interven-
tions into the ‘banal places of the city’ (Bassett, p. 398) and
although it might seem that they inform the practitioners in
this discussion, I argue that although there are similarities,
these are in their form, but not in their intent.
The Situationist derive ‘roamed over the city in search of
subversive unities d’ambience, spaces of non-synchronicity’
(Andreotti and Costa, 1996a, p. 3). Those engaged in the
derive were ‘concerned with the ecological analysis of the
absolute or relative character of the fissures in the urban
network, of the role of micorclimates, of the distinct, self
contained character of administrative districts and above all
the dominating action of centres of attraction’ ( Andreotti
and Costa, 1996a). As Guy Debord argued in 1956, the
derive was a ‘ mode of experimental behaviour linked to the
conditions of urban society, a technique of transient passage
through varied ambiences’ (Andreotti and Costa, 1996b,
p. 690). As such, we can see that these walks were a
commentary on the political nature of place and its
inhabitation in the politics of modern life. And although
they involved acts of walking and often used or created maps
as a device to engage derivers in the event, this is the end of
their similarity to Richard Long and to my central interest in
the use of walking as a method and methodology for the
mapping of landscape. In this text, my intention is to focus
on those artists for whom walking is a personalized poetic
The Cartographic Journal
and possibly radical investigation of the human relationship
to landscape, place, distance and movement. I use the term
radical in the sense that their work confronts the dominant
space and place discourse within the art world which focuses
on the nature of urban life or the spatial manipulation of
cities. Landscape art which focuses on the often uninhabited
world was once at the centre of the art practice, and has now
become the exception rather the norm.
In the later part of the twentieth century, a number of
artists emerged, whose practice has focused on performative
installations and spatial interventions. The curator Julianna
Engberg classifies these artists as ‘walkers’. These are artists
(e.g. Richard Long) whose creative practice is embodied in
walking (Engberg, 2003). Walking, like painting or carving,
is one of the forms of their creative expression. These walks
may or may not be recorded, and any marks, physical
interventions in the landscape or associated documentation
that directly relates to the walk, is an additional creative
outcome related to the performance of the walk. The
documentation is a secondary construct and an interpreta-
tion or representation of something. It is another aspect of
the work, it is not lesser and nor is it the focus where the
aim is to create the image or documentation, and the
performance is the means to the end. The walk is not a
source of inspiration for the documentation or creation of
another piece of work, and nor is the documentation
secondary or an after thought, but these two entities
(artefact and act) are different aspects of the one, and they
are creations to themselves. In this way, it is possible to
draw similarities between the embodied acts of dancers,
performance artists or musicians and those artists whom we
may refer to as walkers. We could argue that these ‘walkers’
are not different from any other artist, writer or designer.
After all, all creativity is an embodied act engaging the
process of the senses and of perception, and for these artists,
walking as an embodied transition through space is the focus
of their investigation and their bodies become the pencil or
the brush. They perform the response to the landscape that
they are in, and the representation of it.
MAPPING AS A CREATIVE PRACTICE
Maps are seductive, and the practice of drawing or creating
maps has been part of the human condition long before
what we now name to be maps were created (Hartley,
1987). Our contemporary fascination with GIS technolo-
gies and the inclusion of their capacity within so many other
everyday tools bears witness to our love, or perhaps our
need, to be able to articulate or know where we are: our
need to be placed. Perhaps for some, being able to see
themselves placed on a map helps to create a sense of
certainty about their presence in the world. Abstractedly, I
know and can tell others that I am here. This is what J. B.
Hartley names the ‘mapping impulse’ (1987). This is an
impulse or a practice that has been aligned with the
territorialization of space (Castro, 2009, p. 10). The
creation of the map enables the map maker or commis-
sioner, to have possession of a place. The map is not an
artefact to itself, is a marker of an understanding and
perhaps a means for the ownership of space (for example,
Walking the Line
this is my land, I have been here). Our mapping ability is
fundamentally linked to our ability to represent or describe
our experience of space. The map is the intermediary
between the abstraction of geospatial location and the
phenomenon of being there. In this way, the view of the
map, the position of the viewer, the level of detail or clarity,
and the poetics and the layers of interpretation, become
part of the description of place. They are the means for
articulating our authority over that which is mapped:
whether it is the specific site or locale, or our experience
of having been there (King, 1996).
Across the visual arts, many practitioners are enticed by
the contrast between the inner subjective world of the arts,
and the order and objectivity of the sciences. This has
resulted in many works that explore the use of classification,
inventories, catalogues and hierarchies as a means for
containing or making sense the messiness of the world
and the artist’s observation of it. This is what Luca Cerizza
(2003, p. 18) explains as, ‘The beauty of order and
classification is also the beauty of measuring and ranking
and its irrational opposite’. In this way, order both
circumvents the subjective and irrational world, and high-
lights its presence. Maps are ordinary devices that use
systems, signs, conventions, rules and laws, to make the
abstract tangible and knowable. It is through them that the
tension between the objective (science) and the subjective
(art) of place is played out. This tension is what engages the
creative practitioner: in the one form (the map), multiple
readings are possible, and new conceptions of space and
place can be explored and shared with the audience.
The reading of maps, like the reading of creative works,
involves an exchange between audience, maker and artefact.
In order to be read, it is essential that both the content and
the form of the artefact (the map) make sense and are
accessible to those who engage in reading it. It is a spatial
activity that is realized through an exchange between
artefact and human. This spatial exchange includes the
relationships between various components of the maps
(usually images and words on a plain), as well as an
exchange between people and artefact. This includes the
dialogue between the artefact and the viewer (both in form
and familiarity with the literacy of the form), and between
the artefact and the maker. By this, I am referring to the
material exchanges that occur through the practices of
making and the sense of ownership a maker may have for
the completed artefact of their labour. In this way, the
creation of the mapping artefact is the realisation of
complex and interconnected spatialized and temporal
actions (Friedman, 1993). Time in relation to space is
essential in this reading activity, and to the construction of
knowledge and the record of it. The spatial act of creating
happens in and over time, the map is more than the final
outcome, and the map in all its forms (from conception to
the various actions of realisation) is continuously engaged in
a spatial conversation. This is a conversation that takes place
between place or locale, the maker, the reader and the map.
CONSIDERING THE PRACTICES OF RICHARD LONG
In this next section, I will explore the relationship between
the creative works of Richard Long1, and theories or
319
expectations of walking as a creative practice and the
practices of mapping and place making.
Richard Long has engaged in the practice of map making
as a means for articulating and exploring his conceptual
artworks since the early 1960s; he is best known for his
performative works, usually made through walking. ‘Long’s
art is rooted in his deep affinity with nature, often realised
on, or as solitary walks’ (Wallis, 2009, p. 34). These walks
have occurred on every continent and season. Walks have
been straight, curvilinear, repeated and varying in distance.
There are the 100 Mile Walk in Australia, 2½ Day Walk in
the Scottish Highlands, A Walking Tour in the Berner
oberland and Hundred Mile Walk along a Line in County
Mayo just to name a few of the hundreds of landscape
interventions he has undertaken. His walks have two key
aspects: first, there is a walk which is a performance to itself,
and second, there is either a documentation of the walk or
the landscape intervention that occurred during the walk.
These vary from arrangements in the landscape, the
transposition of stones, slate or sticks from a particular site
and represented in a gallery setting (for example, Stone Line
Comprised of 208 Stones, Konrad Fisher Gallery, Zurich,
Switzerland, 1981) to the repeated actions of a stone
repeatedly picked up and thrown as a navigational device for
a walk through the English countryside. Each of these is a
form of mapping and the documentation of them is a place
marker of a location.
Richard Long’s work emerged out of the experiment in
the School of Art, Central Saint Martins, in London in the
1960s. The focus of the curriculum was freedom of
expression and the graduates of the School are who’s who
of British Art from then. In the spirit of the social and
cultural change that London was experiencing at this time,
there was an expectation that students would challenge,
explore and establish their own places within a socially
relevant art world. This was the time of the rise of
Conceptual Art and the dominance of Abstraction. The
objective of art was no longer the focus of creative
production, but was the context, the commentary and the
contribution of art to broader social issues that was the
focus of many artists’ works. It was within this context that
Richard Long began his performative walks in nature. While
acknowledging the influence of these art movements on his
own work, he names himself to be a realist (Wallis, 2009,
p. 34), stating that his works are ‘abstract laid down in the
real spaces of the world’ (Wallis, 2009). These real spaces
are typically natural, rural and often remote locations. He
states:
My work is real not illusory or conceptual
it is about real stones, real time, real actions
My work is not urban, nor is it Romantic.
It is the laying down of modern ideas in
the only practical places to take them.
The natural world sustains the industrial world.
I use the world as I find it.
…
A walk is just one more layer, a mark,
laid upon the thousands of other layers of
human geographic history on the
surface of the land. Maps help to show this. (Wallis,
2009, p. 143)
320
Some theorists attempt to classify Richard Long as being
a land artist, one who is engaged with moulding or shaping
the land like paint on a canvas, but he rejects this
interpretation of his practice (Wallis, 2009, p. 175). For
him, land artists want to control the land in order to own or
manipulate it by leaving a permanent mark, whereas he
prefers to tread lightly on the surface of the earth. His
interventions are transitory, involving marks made walking,
the replacement or displacement of stones, or the tempor-
ary placement of artificial objects in the landscape and then
removing them. His walks, the most persistent of his
practices, are the best example of this. Richard Long’s art is
about nature, as explained and realized in the landscape.
Rather than ownership or dominion of the landscape, he
uses the scale of the body measured through time and
distance to explore the places of the world.
In relation to the work of Richard Long, Francesco
Careri (2002, p. 150) comments, ‘Here walking is not only
an action, it is also a sign, a form that can be superimposed
on existing forms, both in reality and on paper’. Richard
Long’s work embraces walking as an aesthetic practice
within a space, and through connection to that space,
unknown landscapes become places for the viewer. Joseph
Miller (1995) argues that we are able to make meaning or
sense of distant places, and to feel that we know them
through maps and place names. This is the effect that
Long’s work has on us. We have not travelled with him to
Dartmoor or taken a 6 day walk across the English
landscape (Long and Lelie, 1997; Careri, 2002), but
through his artefacts and records, we have a sense of where
he has been and what it was like.
What is particularly interesting is the scale of many
of Richard Long’s walks, such as 100 Mile Walk in a
Straight Line in Australia, Walk of the Same Length as the
River Avon, 84 Mile Northward Walk along the Foss Way
Roman Road and Walk of Four Hours and Four Stone Circles;
each of these walks is enormous in its scale. As shown in the
work Walking a Line in Peru, 1972 (Figure 1), the titles are
both evocative and descriptive, and it is difficult to
comprehend how the walking artist can communicate the
complexity of his work to a viewer after the fact. In some of
his early works, Richard Long endeavoured to communicate
the complexity of distance and time through the annotation
of maps. For example, in the project Wiltshire 12–15 October
1969 (Fuchs, 1986), the annotation of the map that he has
used communicates to the viewer the paths taken on four
walks undertaken in a square. The shortest of these went for
1 h 55 min, the longest was 11 h 20 min. For each walk, we
see the point of departure and the continuous line drawn in a
square pattern over a contour map; the text on the maps says
‘Each square drawn on the map was walked separately and as
accurately as possible, without rehearsal. The total walking
time for each square is given’ (Fuchs, 1986, p. 19). The
combination of the text and the line tells the viewer about the
evolving spatial dimension of the work and helps the viewer
to imagine what happened, what it is was like and the effort
involved. The work assumes a certain level of familiarity with
contour maps and the cartographic markings convey some of
the complexity of the work and the walking. This practice of
annotating maps as a method of communicating the walks
has continued throughout Richard Long’s practice and is
The Cartographic Journal
Figure 1. Richard Long: Walking a Line in Peru, 1972, 112 6
81.3 cm
possibly the most literal interpretation of his poetic
interventions.
In addition to these obvious mapping works, Richard
Long has produced numerous photographic works that
document site specific works in the landscape. These
installations often focus on the displacement or placement
of materials found native to the site that is being walked or
explored. They include works as subtle as the placements of
sticks on the ground in a woodland, such as A Line in
Canada or Sticks in the North Woods, to the more complex
works such as Five Stones, Iceland 1974 or Touchstones
Shelter from the Storm, A Five Day Walk in Iceland and
Summer 1972 where the landscape is intervened, and more
permanent yet ephemeral works are recorded on site. Each
of these draws our attention to the specific features of a site,
its landscape, its characteristics and the experience of being
there. As such, they are extremely localized maps of terrain,
bringing together in their abstraction, the cultural, human
and natural aspects of the site that is being explored. Unlike
the map annotation works, the photographs of these
ephemeral maps draw us into the complexity and beauty
of the location. Such works with their ephemeral form also
raise the question of which is the map? I have suggested that
it is the work at the site, but perhaps it could be argued that
it is the photograph which is the record of the site that is the
map. I believe that it is both. In this case, the photograph is
the skilled record, the printed artefact, the medium of
the map, the interpretation or description of the site in the
work at the site, the capturing of the knowledge and the
spatial understanding as realized in the artefact.
This brings me to the third form of Richard Long’s
mapping interventions, the maps he creates through words
on a plain. From a place name to a description of a process
and the arrangements of works on a surface, Richard Long’s
text works are maps of great complexity through which he is
able to convey or describe to us the nature of the place and
the challenge or experience of the map maker in one
artefact. The process of mapping is laid bare and the reader
or viewer engages in the spatial dialogue with the site, the
form and the creator. The early text works were descriptive,
a way of telling others what he had done and where he had
Walking the Line
been. They then transitioned to include the qualities of the
walk and the place, the rhythm, the pace and duration of
the event.
A FIVE DAY WALK
FIRST DAY TEN MILES
SECOND DAY TWENTY MILES
THIRD DAY THIRTY MILES
FOURTH DAY FORTY MILES
FIFTH DAY FIFTY MILES
TOTNES TO BRISTOL BY ROADS AND LANES
ENGLAND 1980
(Fuch. 1986, p. 95)
R. H. Fuchs (1986) argues that words have more
precision than maps or photographs. They are always
concise, consistent in that they are always an arrangement
of letters and it is the arrangement and their context that
gives them meaning. For him, words are a means for
managing scale. ‘Sherwood Forest tells us about a whole
and no single image can capture the whole in the same way’
(Fuchs, 1986, p. 102). Those 14 letters, or two words,
convey to the reader/viewer the nature of the place. It
implies its complexity, and for those who are so informed,
there is also the cultural connection to history, mythology
and politics. There are both a literalness and a poetry to
such works and through these, the landscape, the location
and our ability to understand its spatiality are conveyed to
us. Even when he tells us of a journey ‘Totnes to Bristol by
roads and lanes’, we immediately know the location, and
have a sense of the duration and the methodology of the
work; through these words, we know (or have a good sense
of) the place(s) and the itinerary.
There are connections between these works and conven-
tional travel itineraries, maps and the documentation of
journeys in words. Eric Ames (2009, p. 51) argues that
documentary provides a space between place, landscape,
interiority and exteriority. It is ‘a paradoxical space of
imagined interiority, which is also a representation of the
physical world that we inhabit’. As Eric Ames documentary
is an artefact of affective discovery, it is about a process of
self-discovery as it is a representation of the ‘other’ place,
this ‘other’ place being the objective place that is being
documented. Richard Long embraces the complexity of the
internal or personalized view of the external world that he
documents, or perhaps more correctly, he translates this for
us, the viewer of his interventions into place.
Although Richard Long’s artistic interventions are always
grounded in topographic or geographic, and sometimes
thematic engagements with particular locales, these are
subjective views of the external world and landscape.
Through his measuring and recording of time and space,
he creates an account of duration, where a body moving
through space is a means to measure distance and time.
However, despite its abstraction and subjectivity, Richard
Long’s text works support R. H. Fuchs’s argument for the
power of a few letters to convey complexity, and provide a
sense of totality. These works have a conciseness about
them and even in their abstraction, they have a clarity of
place. In the same way, Long’s images and performative
works provide a spatial understanding of locale. The
resulting ‘maps’ are performative and ritualistic, and they
321
are realized through their project specific rules. As Eric
Ames (2009, p. 63) argues, it is the combination of these
two qualities (the performative and the ritualistic), which is
essential to the creation of documentary, and in this case,
these documentaries, or the documentation of sites and
journeys, are articulated as maps. Founded on the premise
that no landscape is neutral, ceremony (rules) and
performance (walks) are used to create and record affective
experience and subsequent knowledge of place, and record
which can be conceived of as maps of human and cultural
geographies.
WALKING AS A MAPPING PRACTICE
Walking is a sensorial means for engaging with space and
for transitioning from place to place (Wunderlich, 2008,
p. 125). It enables us to learn about and to develop
connections to specific places (Tuan, 1977). Filip Matos
Wunderlich (2008, p. 126) argues walking as ‘both a
purposeful activity and as a creative and critical spatial
practice’, because ‘(w)alking practices vary in pace, rhythm
and purpose and nurture our long term intimacy and more
or less a critical relationship to place’ (Wunderlich, 2008,
p. 131). He goes on to argue that walking can be
conceptualized through three classifications (purposive,
discursive and conceptual). Through these classifications,
our understanding of walking transitions from being a
normative urban form of transportation to being something
more, or something other, a deliberate intervention in
space. In the case of artists such as Richard Long, the
practice of walking is not just a part of the norm, but is
exceptional. This is not exceptional in terms of the derives
of the Situationists where walks were disruptions within the
everyday movement of the city, but Richard Long’s
exception is planned and undertaken in ways that are no
longer seen to be part of the everyday. These are not
reflections on walks of the everyday as presented by Michel
de Certeau (1984), but accounts of walking as temporal and
purposeful performances, undertaken at particular places
classified for their specific durations of time and distance.
Through this discussion of the walking practices and
documentation of these walks by the artist Richard Long, I
have endeavoured to highlight the possibility that there are
many ways that we may articulate and represent our
understanding of space. Eric Ames (2009, p. 57) states
that ‘Traditionally landscape has served to convey a sense of
locale, creating in turn a meaningful site where individual
and social identities are formed’. This idea of the creation of
identity through landscape and its representation shares
elements with the mapping impulse. However, although
Theresa Castro discusses this impulse through a compulsion
to possess, the types of embodied mapping in this
discussion is not about possessing landscapes or locales,
but about coming to know the place and oneself through
engaging with it.
The practice of walking is one way that we are able to
kinaesthetically perceive a space and engage with it. As we
transition from one specific locale to another, we create an
integrated trajectory, a line drawn by a body across terrain.
This line is more than a mark, and even though Richard
322
Long names some of his interventions as walking a line, I
think that this distracts us from the idea of the embodied
walker marker/map maker. Such walks are a process of
mapping that is realized through the body as it moves
through an itinerary. Richard Long engages in a form of
planned happenstance. Through a series of rules for a walk
(100 miles, from place A to place B, northward or the like),
he sets an intention and an expectation of an outcome that
whether it is an artefacts, experience or both. Unlike the
walks of Jean Jacques Rousseau or Henry David Thoreau
whose walks were framed by a chance to walk, to think and
in some cases to be somewhere else, Richard Long’s walks
are designed to be investigations and records of the real
world that he is in. This is not the real political world of the
Situationists, but the real material world of the natural
environment. It is in this way that I argue that walking can
be realized as a mapping practice, an act of creating and
communicating about the nature of place, and the abstract
of the unknown or the unrendered becomes tangible. Like
the tradition of running a pen held in a hand across a
surface, the walker’s feet as they pass across the earth
become an instrument that enables a path, a landscape and a
place to become known. The body moving through space
does not replace the pen and it is more than the means: it is
an experience of the movement, of the transition through
space, held in the memory and recorded in image, object
and text.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Laurene Vaughan is an
associate professor in the
School of Media and
Communication at RMIT
University. She is also a
research leader within
RMIT’s Design Research
Institute. Since 2005, she
has been project leader and
researcher within the
Australasian CRC for Inter-
action Design. Originally
coming from an art and
design education back-
ground with a major in
sculpture, Laurene has melded a career of practicing artist,
designer and educator in Australia and internationally.
Within her practice, Laurene endeavours to explore and
present comment on the interactive and situated nature of
human experience, particularly creative practice. Her PhD
research in this field is entitled ‘Anfractuous: an exploration
of creative practice’.
NOTES
1
The Tate Britain held a retrospective of the works of
Richard Long: Heave and Earth, 3 June–6 September
2009. Included in this text is the reflection by the author on
attending the exhibition. Unfortunately, due to copyright
The Cartographic Journal
limitations, it is not possible to include more images of the
artist’s work. More can be seen at the website http://
www.richardlong.org/
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