I am an artist who started with walking and kept going, into performance; installation; drawing; academia; broadcasting and writing: walking is a humble and humbling act, put most simply it is the human way of getting about. Walking has become the foundation of my trans-disciplinary practice that was instigated at Oxford Brookes University where I studied undergraduate work in both Ecology, Gaia Theory and Fine Art, before undertaking the worlds first MA in Arts & Ecology at Dartington College of Arts. My practice and approach to study and research, and the ongoing blurring of those processes has manifested itself into a practice that does not restrict itself to traditional notions, boundaries, mediums or modes of practice: it is an ecological form of practice that is simultaneously Conceptual in its methods, Romantic in its outcomes. Walking Home saw me draw a line on a map from London back to Switzerland, an 800km long transect from the house I lived in back to the place I was born, a line that was first drawn, then walked, written, performed and talked into being through a practice-based PhD that appropriated methods from ethnography, ecology, performance and writing. For A Transect for Trelowarren I am once again looking forward to stepping out onto a line, first drawn and then walked and talked into being in collaboration with a team of ecologists and a country estate looking into the process of wilding, uncovering what is already there, what could be there and what should be there, and what those questions might mean, the composition of narrative gestures and performed texts out of fragmented conversations that take place along a transect that is aiming to cut through Cornwall, through contemporary Ecology, through the scientific method, through institutions, country estates or universities, with the aim of hosting an ongoing conversation around conservation.
“The fellowship is a fantastic opportunity to amalgamate, reconvene and gather together disparate fragments of a project I have been working my way around since I was 19, the attempt to cohere a form of arts practice that is eco-logical, and a form of eco-logical practice that is creatively and holistically driven.” – Bram Arnold for Arts & Culture Exeter, 2019.