Exploring Places

As well as reading about Place and Space, (perambulatory practice, land art and all...) I've been taking time to explore some of the places for walking around Leicester. [Also a good way to avoid heat and bright lights which seem to be triggering migraine... :( ]

[Friday]: Houghton on Hill, to the east, has lots of well-marked footpaths with new stock-proof kissing gates and bright yellow waymarkers. Arable and sheep, with some woodland thickets and several drainage ditches.

[Sunday]: Bradgate Park, Charnwood, to the North West, (part of the National Forest, a 200 square mile forest-in-becoming which I first heard about at the EMPAF conference) is an amazing, spacious park with rocky outcrops, follies, ruins, reserviors and (on Sunday) a continuous stream of visitors with dogs, children riding new bikes and scooters, and visitors from every direction. A beautiful small gushing natural river. (It's surprisingly rare to see a river carving it's own banks these days) and deer grazing with remarkable confidence for the number of visitors and dogs about. The Forest newsletter showed a one oak project that reminds me of Liz Milner's oak in North Somerset, and a healthy mix of natural foraging, planting, caring and leisure info.

[Monday]: Abbey Park had looked fun on the map and was much larger and more interesting than I'd imagined. Not dissimilar to St James's Park, it could be the next location for the remapped tour of e-merge.
But actually it could be more than that - a collation of all my recent mediascape work, with the melodies of Avebury interactive superimposed on the Abbey ruins, e-merge on the lake perambulations, and Soundlines perhaps the open spaces leading close to the river.

Trees, trees, paths and trees. Connections to my experimental piece coming out of the Landscape and Environment conference last June. Personification, trees with the video work I've been recently doing. And simultaneous co-existence. Connections across place. The performance work of Sorrel Muggeridge, again in Aberystwyth (and across the sea to Quebec...)

Lots of ideas of strands coming together.

It's good to walk.