Walking Together/Apart: A Shared Practice

Sarah Bild, Jo Milne, Anna Walker
How can we share both the presence and absence walking across three landscapes in different parts of the world?

Walking Together/Apart is an inquiry—a performative gesture, a method of thinking, a mode of discovery. A central question within our shared practice is its dissemination and documentation. Meeting regularly and irregurlalry online each of us brings a distinct focus—an individual intention that feeds into our individual research and this shared exploration. Through daily walking, we cultivate a sense of place and connection, 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. 
  • Anna (Buckinghamshire) is drawn to the way we walk in different directions—how we navigate terrain and embody it. What are our points of departure, our arrivals? How do our landscapes shape us, and how do we shape them? What traces do we leave behind?
  • 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. Walking her grief, her loss.

5 Gates Walk, October 2025

Walk 1
Sarah Bild, 5 Gates, Montreal, Canada October, 2025.
INSTRUCTIONS:

Turn right out of your house and walk 232 paces. Take another right and walk 242 paces to arrive at GATE 1: a long wall.
Follow a sort of staircase-like path for 173 paces to arrive at GATE 2: the entrance to the Champ des possibles.
Continue along a fence along the railroad tracks for 100 paces and take a soft right for another 70 paces to Gate 3: toward a little hillock in the middle of the Champ.
From the hillock, follow the path for 130 paces to Gate 4: through a brush of sumac bushes (fiery and magnificent in the fall) towards a stand of 3 majestic poplars.
At Gate 4, continue towards the office tower and turn right at the sumac for 80 paces towards Gate 5, to exit the Champ.
Walk 2
Anna Walker, 5 Gates, Buckinghamshire, UK, October, 2025.
INSTRUCTIONS:

Walk 4 steps from your front door. Pause: Gate 1
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?
Make a right and walk for 10 minutes in one direction.
 I walk a meandering path that curves to the right then the left. I walk at a medium pace, not too slow, not too fast. I witness my thoughts. Notice the birds, their numbers, their songs. I follow the clouds. The plane trails against a blue sky. When I am not listening outwards I  notice the noticing. I become more than my body, more than walking.
After 10 minutes, make another right, continuing to notice. Walk for 5 minutes. Pause: Gate 2.
I walk across a railway bridge. I cross the road and pause at the second gate, turning my body to the left before passing through the gate.
Make a left through the gate, then walk for 10 minutes. Pause: Gate 3.
I walk down a gentle slope to gate 3. To my left is a stream. I wait, I listen.
Make a right and walk for 5 minutes. Pause: Gate 4.
A new pathway of flattened grass, dry and springy, to avoid the muddy walked pathway that runs parallel. The view is vast, and as I gaze to the horizon and the setting sun, the field curves. I imagine I am seeing the curve of the earth.
Make a left and pass through the gate, walk diagonally to the right for 5 minutes. Oak tree stands tall beyond gate 5.
I walk towards Oak tree, my friend. The place where I sit no matter the weather.
Pause: Gate 5. Listen; notice, ponder, reflect.
Walk 3
Jo Milne, 5 Gates, Hosta Francs, Spain, October 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. Arrive at 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.

5-Gates Walk, March 2025


Jo Milne, 5 Gates, Hosta Francs, Spain, 6th-12th March, 2025.
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.

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, footsetps 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. 

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