Walking is a formative human mode of movement historically associated with reflective thought, from the Peripatetic tradition to modern artistic practices that employ ambulation as a methodology. This study links walking and drawing as accessible acti...
Walking is a formative human mode of movement historically associated with reflective thought, from the Peripatetic tradition to modern artistic practices that employ ambulation as a methodology. This study links walking and drawing as accessible actions and proposes walking as an approach to artistic production through which the experience of movement is articulated as drawing. It examines walking as an artistic practice in order to investigate the meanings of dwelling and mobility and to explore the relationship between place and memory. The study aims to demonstrate that the experience of walking through place corresponds to the act of drawing and that, through the bodily gesture of inscribing lines on a surface, one may become responsive to the world.
My practice moved from representing urban scenery through drawing toward mapping experiences encountered while walking through the city. Between 2012 and 2016, during undergraduate study in fine arts, I began to consider the relationship between an attitude toward life and drawing through sketches of urban landscapes. Focusing on works produced and presented between 2020 and 2024, this research explicates artistic intentions and production processes, while also tracing an iterative trajectory of revision and renewed experimentation prompted by reflection after each presentation. During the pandemic, participation in a residency program for artists prompted my sustained attention to walking. As both an artist and a resident, I undertook meandering walks through my neighborhood to better understand its places and produced drawings grounded in my immediate environment. In 2022, I presented drawings derived from my walks and journey-based experiences in my first solo exhibition, foregrounding the nexus of memory and place. Two years later, I revisited the same place with attention to modes of walking and published an artist book edited from drawings that trace line-forms discovered along the route.
Grounded in the conjunction of walking and drawing, this study frames drawing as both an intellectual investigation and a bodily trace – an inscription of thought and movement on the material ground of paper through which the course of terrestrial experience may be rendered visible. My walking-based mode of urban engagement is situated within the legacies of Surrealist wandering and the Situationist dérive: the former pursued chance encounters and automatist drifting as a means of approaching the self, while the latter experimented with playful movement, emotional disorientation, and the psychogeographic effects of urban terrain. Within this historical context, I resist inward absorption and instead adopts an outward, site-responsive stance that accepts the physical conditions of traversed environments. The study ultimately proposes walking-as-drawing as a practice that cultivates moments of awakening and reflection and enables critical exploration of the relations among place, memory, and collective grief.