This five-minute video essay was extracted from the longer video installation from the British Council-sponsored Parallel Walking exhibition at Artefact Gallery, Stirchley in February 2022. It is combined here with the 'Female Calculations' text from Parallel Walking zine (text below).
The film is available for showing at film nights and festivals. Please get in touch if you'd like to show it. The longer video installation is 1 hr 40 mins and lives here.
A lone female walker in the city often brings a subjective algorithm of fear to her walk, one that factors in both positive and negative data points.
For example:
weather
lighting
time of day
the number, gender and proximity of others
type of area
path type
visibility
clear exit
proximity to help
shoe type
femininity of clothing
previous location knowledge
lived experience
attitude
locator apps
self-defence weapon
skills in kung fu
unconscious bias
…and more.
You can optimise your personal algorithm to reduce the fear.
For example by:
walking tall
looking fierce
wearing running shoes
avoiding shortcuts
holding keys as a weapon
…and so on.
But the calculation still takes place. It informs how, when and where you walk. I enjoy walking the pedestrian paths in my city. But sometimes the simple act of going for a walk can feel like a psychological battle.
Hello. I'm baaaaack. Haiiii long-term subscribers (aka people I know)! And anyone else new to these random textual shores. Bless me Father for I have sinned. It's been seven months since my last blog session.
For those who don't jump the links, the summary is that November to March was dominated by Walkspace's first funded project – a Parallel Walking project with Jalan Gembira (a female-led walking collective in Indonesia) that was funded by the British Council. There was a cross-cultural exhibition, a zine, an online launch and artist talks, two digital collages, both a long and short film, and a whole lot of 12-hour days on helping pull it all together. (Links and details.)
The result of doing that on top of my day job was that I had a visually induced vertigo attack that has taken a few weeks to subside. I then became allergic to my meds for it. And the visual dizziness made my day job very difficult since it was triggered by too much screen work – and I'm a digital editor.
But after a week away, new anti-blue-light occupational glasses and screen breaks every 20 minutes, I think I'm back – and able to blog again.
Which is a good thing because there are a few big announcements coming up. Stay tuned!
Back in April, I emailed the organisers of the 4th World Congress of Pyschogeography (4WCoP) to ask: "Might there be a interesting discussion in the idea of how women walk together…" Mainly I wanted to get some wider framing/context for the Crone and Dazzle walks, to connect with other female walkers and also listen to other women share their walk experiences.
That Fiona Weir and Sonia Overall immediately picked it up and ran with it, taking part themselves on top of running the 4WCoP, was generous to say the least. They pulled it together with Dr Sheree Mack, North East Leader for Black Girls Hike and neurodivergent Midlands artist and writer …kruse to make a panel of five. We kept our presentations brief (3-5 mins) to allow for a starter question asking people to contribute a word they associated with how women walk (see the sad word cloud at the top of this post) and also plenty of space for others to talk after. We also had a word/theme to guide each of us – Play, Privilege, Presence, Purpose and Permission.
The recording is here and my talk pasted below. It's looking like there will be some follow-up as the conversation is continuing. Watch this space.
My P-word for today is ‘Presence’, so I’m going to talk about two walks. One is all about presence, the other all about absence but both are about being seen on your own terms.
A bit about me…
Started a walking practice in 2016 to become fitter – this was mostly walking at night after work in the dark
For safety I kept to main roads but sometimes I blended into the darkness, unseen
Realised I liked being invisible. I felt safer – it gave me back some power in not feeling like a potential target all the time
My first bit of walk-based writing was about entering my local park at night, ninja like, hopping behind trees, in order not to be seen [read link].
The other thing that has become a part of my practice is becoming an activist.
They say that when your oestrogen runs out, you are less likely to put up with all the crap that women have to deal with. And that was me. I started getting angry and wanting to change things – also I realised that this was partly a function of going through the menopause. I think that comes across both walks.
Crone Walk
In May a group of four of us decided to stake our place in the city. We were all at that certain age where women start to become invisible and we wondered what it would be like to walk in order to be ‘seen’. Where and when we walked seemed important but also how.
So we spent an hour walking where women might feel less comfortable – on canal towpaths, in subways, etc. We also walked around Broad Street and the entertainment district where everyone was 30 years younger and which was very crowded on the first Saturday night out of lockdown.
We dressed up in bright colours, played with female stereotypes and carried props of stuffed toys. We walked in silence as if in a procession and a photographer papped us as we walked. Which has the effect of shining a spotlight directly on us.
It was more intense than the photo maybe shows. People did comment and stare but really it was more about our experience of reclaiming space as older women, and also about the bonding process of women walking together and talking together and of doing something for themselves.
I liked the idea of radical softness – this was a quiet act of provocation in the landscape.
Afterwards there was a lot of discussion about ageing and gender. I had a lot of thoughts – too many for here so I wrote a big essay called Send in The Crones. I’d be interested to know if anyone else is doing walking based on these topics of gender+age.
Dazzle Walks
This was a commission from The Dazzle Club which explores surveillance in public spaces. As a middle-aged women, I’ve discovered I’m literally invisible to facial recognition systems and a lot of digital capture. Long story short, I’ve become beige with age!
And that’s how the Beige City Strollers became the unofficial title of the first Birmingham Dazzle Walk. I invited …kruse to walk with me and use the camouflage of age as anti-surveillance countermeasures. We wore low contrast clothing and makeup to become less visible and make it harder for the cameras to find the markers of our face. We literally became the stereotypes of invisible older women as we walked through the city centre, unnoticed and unobserved in our blandness.
In stark contrast a month later I did a second female Dazzle Walk and this time we painted our faces with Dazzle paint to confuse facial recognition systems. We were approached so many times by men that I lost count. We even ended up following one because he started following a single woman after approaching us.
Again there is a lot to talk about in terms of the work that women do to feel safe when they walk, or to discourage approaches by strangers – and the conflict that we should have to jump through these hoops at all. One for the discussion.
By summer 2020, various museums and archives were looking for material to illustrate what life was like for people in the early stages of the pandemic. I submitted my 'First 100 Days of Lockdown' pandemic diary – kept as a public record of my own experience – to a couple of archives in the UK and US, and also four collages from Birmingham Collage Collective's monthly prompts into a new Birmingham Life on Lockdown project.
The Life on Lockdown project began in May 2020 with a call out to Birmingham's citizens, which ran for six months. Birmingham Museums Trust started collecting digital content of the Brummie experiences during lockdown with the aim of keeping a record of the Covid-19 pandemic "to ensure that future generations could learn about this extraordinary time".
More than 400 photos, videos, poems, artworks, songs, performances, and stories were collected, "creating a snapshot of 184 days from lockdown, to the easing of restrictions, to Tiers; from a heatwave through to winter". The material is online at Flickr and also currently being displayed in an exhibition at Thinktank at Millennium Point.
It was great to see two of my collages appear in the project video, at 1 min 42 secs (dark!) and 3 mins 49 secs (upbeat!).
The five collages in the Thinktank display are:
More collages / info on my collage practice can be found on my Collage project page. I also post to Instagram: @editoriat.
The Birmingham Collage Collective website is live and it looks great. All 28 current members are listed on there, complete with bios and collage. Plus, there is a shop selling the supercute limited edition enamel badges for £5 – and soon, hopefully, original collage pieces by BCC members.
The collective formed in 2018, set up by Adam Wynn. It features a number of talented Birmingham-based collage artists including Mark Murphy and Barbara Gibson, who had a successful joint collage exhibition at Argentea Gallery earlier this year. My photomontage course tutor Hazel Pitt who teaches collage at mac Birmingham, is also in the group, and there are many other local artists and designers.
We aim to have two shows a year. The first was a successful launch exhibition in May – CLIPS – in Digbeth in central Birmingham.
The second will be happening in Stirchley in November. We launch on 21 November at Attic Brewery on Mary Vale Rd, close to Bournville train station. Attic turns one year old that weekend so it'll be a 'boozy do' all round. The show runs to 24 November.
There will be several elements. One is to launch a Birmingham Collage Collective edition of of the gorgeous Provide Zine – which will be on sale for £4.99. These usually sell out so it's a chance to get in and grab a copy.
The other part is that collective members are putting together a '20 for 20' show for the walls of Attic Brewery, with 20 original collages, each going for £20. Christmas is coming…
Finally, if you fancy trying collage in a social environment, then check out the Stirchley Collage Club events held monthly (or so) at Artefact in Stirchley. Artefact announce them on their Facebook events page and Twitter. Come along, why dontcha? The next one is on Saturday 9 November.
Having been a member of Stirchley Collage Club for the past year and with some pieces shown in a couple of open call shows, I'm both pleased and proud to announce that I'll be part of Birmingham Collage Collective's first exhibition opening next week.
I'll be joining a bunch of talented analogue collage artists – including Adam Wynn (@ripitup_startagain), who started the collective, and Mark Murphy (@moif_collage), who helped put the show together. Other collage artists showing their work include:
The exhibition launch is from 6pm next Friday 26 April in Studio 4 Gallery at our favourite framers – The Framers – in Digbeth, and sponsored by Old Blue Last Beer. The show will run until Saturday 11 May, alongside Digbeth First Friday and the Flatpack Film Festival, which takes place in and around the Custard Factory.
Want to join in? There will also be a collage workshop to coincide with World Collage Day from 4-7pm on Saturday 11 May. Book early, it's already looking busy and many of the artists will be attending.
I think I will have two CLIPS up on the wall:
When in Birmingham / 2018 Eyelines and Skylines / 2017
More collage and works in progress are posted to my collage Instagram: @editoriat.
An open call was issued by The Holodeck printmakers in Birmingham: submit an artwork for consideration for their new Riso book and exhibition on the theme of 'Weird Science'. The exhibition was scheduled to run from 14 September to 13 October at Artefact in Stirchley.
I've never thought of myself as an artist but I had it in the back of my mind to do something with rabbits so I started playing around with some photomontaging one hot day during this summer's heatwave.
I produced around 20 'weirded' rabbits using black and white printouts of Joy, our rabbit who had died a couple of months earlier, mashed with creatures cut out from various books. In the end I submitted this simpler rabbit/volcanic island collage – and it was accepted, risoprinted and shown. My first artwork to be in an exhibition! As you can see, I looked pretty chuffed.
Emboldened, I decided to try for another open call, this time by the Edinburgh Collage Collective and Mark Murphy (moif_collage) on the theme of 'postcards'. Once more I spent a very pleasant afternoon putting some options together and posted them under the #cutandpost hashtag to my @editoriat Instagram. As a collage beginner, it was no surprise that I didn't make it into the final cut of 24 printed postcards but it was useful practice putting work together to a theme and a deadline.
In the end I framed one of the postcards and submitted it with another piece for the Artefact Winter Group Show. They were both accepted and were hung in pride of place by the toilet queue in the run-up to Christmas. Someone even offered to buy one of them. The Birmingham postcard still makes me laugh, though I'm tempted to collage something more into the bottom right panel. A work in progress maybe.
This all happened because of a) a local collage club that meets every month, b) having an ace local gallery space that is committed to its community, and c) putting my stuff out there when I could easily have left it in a folder in a cupboard at home and said 'nah, they're not good enough'. I'm glad various people encouraged me to go for it and grateful to those who accepted the work into their art spaces.
I still wouldn't say I'm an artist but I enjoy making the artwork and being a part of something bigger. And I've learnt that if in doubt, go for it.
Every month I attend Stirchley Collage Club and spend a pleasant afternoon with others, creating handmade collages from boxes of random mags and books
Last month I found some fresh motivation to sit down and collage. The Edinburgh Collage Collective (@edinburghcollagecollective) in conjunction with Birmingham collage artist Mark Murphy (@moif_collage) ran an open submissions project on Instagram. It was called Cut & Post – on the theme of postcards. Check out the #cutandpost hashtag to see all the amazing submissions.
Here are some of mine. I have no chance of making the final cut of 24 but it was fun to enter. Latest work is posted to @editoriat.