The psychogeography; tracing the edge of myself.
I started this module heavily influenced by psychogeography, read all of the books and took a course run by Greg Humphries through the St Ives School of Painting.
I thought that my emerging practice had moved far away from the beginning of this module where I was entirely focused on psychogeography. Reflecting on the journey now that the module has nearly finished, I realise I haven’t necessarily moved away as far as I thought. It transpires I am doing what pyschogeographers do best and I am on a 8 month derive! I have flowed, like a rhizome, from one experience to the next, seemingly with no set or planned direction, but rather following where unconscious impulse takes me. I am Virginia Woolf enjoying a walk through London on an evening. I am wayfaring, as Ingold would put it, finding my way through the social, cultural and personal landscape that I inhabit.
Walking is part of the process, an art form in itself. As I walk, I leave a trace, I gather materials to use, I capture the places I visit, I am inspired. As well as the outer landscape transforming me, I transform it. Literally as I gather earth and flowers, but also metaphorically, as I project my inner landscape on to it. I project on to the landscape my thoughts and feelings for others to see. The result is a kind of psychic cartography; a map not of coordinates and symbols but of my moods, experiences and hauntings.
When I walk, I am not simply moving through the landscape, I am entering into a kind of dialogue. A dialogue between myself and the world around me, between my conscious mind and the quieter layers of my memory and intuition. Walking becomes a method of thinking, it is not linear, but rhizomatic and spiralling. It is a way of unearthing the terrain of the self even as I move through the physical landscape.
It wasn’t until I began to explore walking as an artistic and psychogeographic practice that I started to understand how intimately my inner and outer worlds are enmeshed. Each step I take isn’t just a physical action, but a line, a line that draws me through time, through memory, through place. Tim Ingold describes this as wayfaring (Ingold, 2016), the idea that life itself is made of lines that unfold as we move. I feel this deeply. When I walk, I find that memories surface without warning. A smell, a shadow, a certain slant of light, and suddenly I’m no longer in the present moment, but somewhere else entirely. Yet the present and the past overlap. The outer path mirrors the interior movement.
Walking allows me to inhabit a space differently, a kind of liminal space. It is interesting to me that I am often drawn to liminal spaces: the shoreline, bridges, gateways. It disrupts the rhythm and stresses of daily life and opens up a more attentive way of thinking. I start to notice things (Jung would argue these are symbols). These fragments become part of my own internal mapping. I begin to weave my emotions and thoughts into the fabric of the landscape. The landscape stops being anonymous. It becomes personal.
Walking makes space in my life for the poetic. It allows me to leave traces on the landscape, and it leaves traces on me.
Sometimes I let the walk be automatic, let my body be pulled by instinct or curiosity. These desire lines (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013), are not plotted in advance but emerge through risk taking. The walk becomes rhizomatic, branching, looping and never quite predictable. I start to think of myself not as a solitary person moving through the landscape but as part of an assemblage, connected to the things around me. The distinction between me and the landscape begins to blur. I think this is where I begin to experience flow.
“Look at what lies at your feet! A crack in the ground, sparkling gravel, a tuft of grass, some crushed debris offer equally worthy subjects for your applause and admiration.” (Dubuffet Accessed at: https://www.moma.org/artists/1633-jean-dubuffet 5/7/25).
Walking becomes the golden string that threads the external to the internal. I am reminded of why I stitch my path in golden thread onto OS maps. Retracing those steps, retracing the memory, tracing the edge of myself.
The self is as diverse and varied as the journey.
