Walking Together, Apart, Together
Walking: A shared practice, remembering, knowing, creating… Sarah Bild, Jo Milne, Anna Walker
How can we share both the presence and absence of being across three spaces, in three different parts of the world? Walking is an inquiry—a performative gesture, a method of thinking, a mode of discovery. A central question within this practice is how it is documented and shared. Meeting regularly online, just three months into this emerging collaboration, each of us brings a distinct focus—an individual intention that feeds into both our existing research and this shared exploration.
Through daily walking, we cultivate a sense of place—an embodied experience of moving through the world. Though our walks differ in purpose and rhythm, in how we mark time and distance, we are all still moving. We begin to ask: how can we share both the presence and absence of being across three spaces, in three different parts of the world?
We build ideas through Zoom and a shared Google Doc, (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b_RWZ212-OMKXyr87vGzOjnACJ5qY1ivHWP2-MviBu4/edit?usp=sharing) developing a video/sound installation, a webpage, and also a physical gathering where we walk together across the same landscape in real time. We exchange ideas about community experiences, how we can expand the installation through movement, storytelling, and the collection of objects to accompany the moving imagery. We explore what it means to build relationships—with the land, with each other, with technology, and with wider communities. We document, collect, and archive, shaping these materials into something to be shared so the work is constanly expanding and in movement.
- Anna (Buckinghamshire) is drawn to the way we walk in different directions—how we navigate terrain and embody it. What compels us to walk? What are our destinations, our arrivals? How do our landscapes shape us, and how do we shape them? What traces do we leave behind? Despite the physical distance, are there places where we can meet?
- Sarah (Montreal, Canada) seeks to uncover the relationship between walking and thinking—the movement of thought, the fluidity of ideas as they shift between past and present. How does walking create space for new thoughts to emerge?
- Jo (Hostafrancs, Catalunya) walks in time—an exploration of duration. Her bedridden mother can only walk in her mind, and in a way, Jo walks for both of them.
Through daily walking, we cultivate a sense of place—an embodied experience of moving through the world. Though our walks differ in purpose and rhythm, in how we mark time and distance, we are all still moving. We begin to ask: how can we share both the presence and absence of being across three spaces, in three different parts of the world?
We build ideas through Zoom and a shared Google Doc, (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b_RWZ212-OMKXyr87vGzOjnACJ5qY1ivHWP2-MviBu4/edit?usp=sharing) developing a video/sound installation, a webpage, and also a physical gathering where we walk together across the same landscape in real time. We exchange ideas about community experiences, how we can expand the installation through movement, storytelling, and the collection of objects to accompany the moving imagery. We explore what it means to build relationships—with the land, with each other, with technology, and with wider communities. We document, collect, and archive, shaping these materials into something to be shared so the work is constanly expanding and in movement.
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Sarah Bild, 5 Gates, Montreal, Canada March 8th, 2025.
Sarah: I created a written/photo map of my walk through the Champ des possibles (Field of possibilities). I had tried to record my voice but the wind was too strong. I will revisit the walk on a milder, calmer day…
Gate 1: This is where I practised my Wall Series over two summers in 2017 and 2018. It is an urban wall, belonging to 1000 Carpets and Tiles. It is constantly assaulted by graffiti and then repainted by the owners. Sometimes weeds grow there, almost wild through cracks in the sidewalk and other times, it’s all cleared up. I like to remember my practice and let its lessons remind me of coming into sensation through my breath. |
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Anna Walker, 5 Gates, Buckinghamshire, UK, March 4th - 7th, 2025. Pause at each Gate. Notice, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? How do you feel? What thoughts are flashing through your mind? How did you leave your house? What clothes are you wearing? What is the weather like? I’ve been reflecting upon all the places I’ve walked, all the gates (real, metaphorical, and symbolic) that I have passed through. All the points of contact, of resting, of standing, listening, watching, noticing, of trying to catch my thoughts… to think. Movement into video, into movement, into sound. How do I capture/differentiate this walk embedded within so many others that I have walked. I have been walking most of my life, from place to place, season after season, in sunshine, wind, rain and snow. Walking legs walking, swishing, falling, caught by the earth, one foot, one step after another. It’s never one walk, it’s all walks. As I walk I embody every step I have walked through my life, every step my ancestors have walked. When I can’t fall asleep, I walk in my mind, the walk I make daily from point to point. It is a desire for a deeper understanding of how the body, both the individual and the collective, accommodates our histories and our movements from place to place. Layering walks upon walks, walking the changing earth. |
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Jo Milne, 5 Gates, Hosta Francs, Spain, 6th-12th March, 2025. Walk three hundred steps from your door, past the sign that says stop and cross the road. Gate 1. Continue, for at least another couple of hundred steps. The terrain is uneven, stones litter the way, cracks, puddles of unknown substances of a murky brown colour. A crossroads, I always take the left, the path bends, and there’s a slight incline. Upwards, in a busy silence. Gate 2. The path is straight, a sense of looking over the horizon, it is unknown what comes. The sky dominates all below, a blue grey, neither warm nor cold. Gate 3. Following the path downwards, the wind whips gently, a cool caress. Things scutter in the undergrowth and worms slither slowly across the brown sludge that sticks to ones feet. A pungent sense of growth, mixed with strange man-made perfumes that have a hint of sweet evil. Gate 4. The road winds right and then left until it takes a long straight. Strange smells accumulate, milk, pungent chemical soap, shit, blossom, a cocktail of life and death. Gate 5. Continue a few steps before turning right at the crossroads, follow the road round, past the pungent odours of the large grey building, down the slope until veering to the left you stop and you are home. |
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Earlier work:
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Anna Walker: Becoming Bird. 1: Spring (2022, 14 mins), is a layered sound and imagery assemblage that coalesces, changes and reforms in its journey across the screen. Through the work, Walker is extending the idea of knowledge—experiential knowledge—in an attempt to challenge the definitions of animal to human boundaries and the experience of being in a merged/shared world. Anna Walker: Proposition 4: Red is the Colour of Pomegranates, (Video, 12mins, 2020-2023) The video was initially part of a digital residency & exhibition in 2020/2021, which focused on three artists’ shared appreciation of the Soviet director Sergei Parajanov, and his film The Colour of Pomegranates (1969): a visual poem dedicated to the life of 18th-century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova (1712 –1795). |
Jo Milne, Sarah Bild: In-Between/ entre-mig, (Video, 7.44 mins, 2021) expands on the experience of Sarah Bild as a dancer and her interaction with derelict spaces in collaboration with the artist Jo Milne, whose practice explores the visualisation of invisible structures. The video project acts as a communicating vessel, moving between the physical and virtual, between the past and present. Jo Milne: Death as a reforming, (Video, 4mins, 2022). A video about transformation, tracing the death of her beloved dog, Shima, as she transitions into another state. |
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Sarah Bild/ Caroline Hayeur, Le Poids du lieu (Video, 26mins, 2024), was developed as a series of improvised solos in decommissioned, abandoned sites— imbued with history, at times tragic, at others playful. In collaboration with photo/videographer Caroline Hayeur the footage of my improvisations became the basis for three short choreographic films which we presented in March 2024 at Montreal’s Festival des films sur l’art (2024). |
"Is it time?" (Video, 2022), 13.44 minutes in length) emerged from collaborative Zoom meetings, and workshops between Anna Walker, Pepa Ivanova, Carol Liadler, and Siobhan O Neill, in 2022. The voiced memories (in order): Carol Laidler, Anna Walker, Pepa Ivanova, and Siobhan O Neill. The footage is from a Zoom meeting of a workshop by Siobhan O Neill, and Pepa Ivanova's walk through her home town in Bulgaria. It was recorded, assembled and edited by Anna Walker in 2022. |
Bios:
Anna Walker, PhD
Anna Walker, PhD, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the traces of trauma on both the body and the earth, investigating spaces of separation and connection. Through photography, sound, and moving imagery, she examines resilience—how the body responds to overwhelming trauma and stress, and how it reorganises itself to navigate the complexities of such experiences. She earned an MA in Fine Art from Southampton University in 1998 and a certificate in Psychotherapy from CBPC, Cambridge, in 2010. Her work as a psychotherapist deepened her interest in the effects of trauma on the body, leading to a PhD in Arts and Media from Plymouth University, which she completed in May 2017. Since then, she has been weaving photography, sound, and video with the spoken word, using storytelling as both a research tool and a holding space to examine memory, identity, and the possibility of reimagining the world.
www.anna-walker-research.com |
Sarah Bild
Sarah Bild creates deeply textured works of dance. In 2015, her 50+ project addressed the representation of the aging female body on stage. In 2016, Sarah Bild began performing her research in outdoor locations with Wall Series. In She Wanted (2019), an intimate solo performed more than 80 times around a table for just two spectators at a time, Bild shares a personal story evoking motherhood, art practice and fleeting time. More recently, she inhabited derelict urban and rural spaces to investigate sense of place in collaboration with photo/videographer Caroline Hayeur. Their choreographic film Le Poids du lieu, was presented at the 42nd FIFA arts film festival in Montreal in March 2024 and continues to tour in film festivals around the world. Sarah Bild is the first improviser certified to teach the Action Theater technique in Quebec. She teaches regularly at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal and the Université de Montréal, and is a guest choreographer and teacher at several dance training schools across Canada.
https://sarahbild.ca/ |
Jo Milne, PhD
Jo Milne, PhD, is an award winning visual artist who works between Scotland and Spain. Her research focuses on the methodologies used by scientists, artists and visionaries to visualise the invisible. Her work has received awards from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (Canada), the RSA (Scotland), Arena Foundation, AENA, Generalitat de Catalunya (Spain) and she has undertaken residencies at the Museu d’Art de Sabadell, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the IRB Barcelona. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, with solo shows at Fundació Vila Casas (Barcelona), Museu d’Art de Sant Pol (Sant Pol), La Sala (Vilanova), Can Manyé (Alella) and others at Talbot Rice Art Centre (Edinburgh), Widener Gallery (Hartford, USA), Espace Arlaud and Forum (Switzerland). www.jomilne.com
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