On the 17th April 2017 I handed back my apartment keys, shouldered a heavy backpack, and set out on a project to walk every National Waymarked Trail in Ireland. This was the start of a many year journey along lines, following trails and finding connections in the Irish landscape.
This book aims to tread the fine line between creation and research. This project has been a series of moments spent creating to the rhythm of my internal monologue, and being stationary, reflecting on what I’ve made and thought about while walking. All the silent moments now have the potential to create a new narrative, reflecting on the research I find, and the new voices that are sharing the space of my mind.
Footnotes, 2021
Footnotes is the overarching title for the artwork I developed during my Practice-led Masters by Research. This project is founded in my experience of walking all of Ireland’s National Waymarked trails (2017 - 2019), covering some 4000+km. I wrote and made images as I walked, these layers of experience becoming an area for me to reflect on and draw questions from. Some of the main themes I would return to were the ideas of sense of place, and how photography interacts with connection or disconnection to spaces and places. Read more of the research here.
Below is a video of the four-part book set I made at the culmination of my time studying. The style and structure of the books was designed to mimic a guide book. On one side of the box there is the main or larger book which features my main experiences of walking through text and image. On the opposite side there are three companion pieces, each one exploring an off-shoot or tangent I wanted to specifically look at.
These books were made to end a chapter of the project, to give shape to the very intangible art form of walking. Since making this set, one of the four small books, traces, has become its own TLP Edition. I am continuing to work with this body of work to find other ways to share the different parts and elements of it.
Below are some sample sections and images from the different books.
Footnotes
The primary book of the set combines images with snippets of what I wrote while walking
Footnotes: Trails
Footnotes: Trails is the most text-heavy of the books. When walking there were many trails we experienced that had little to no accessible information. By writing short summaries of our experiences, I hope to bridge that gap in some way.
Footnotes: Roads
The act of walking is a very repetitive, rhythmic experience. Roads is a collection of repetitive imagery designed to play on this sensation of repetitive experience - but also as a way to also expand on how long a process the walking was. For me, the repetitive viewing heightens ones awareness of time in both the physical turning of similar pages, and wondering what it was like to just see road after road after road for several years.
