Map Scramble
Let's Drift Again
Happy Spring!
Tomorrow, Monday 23rd March, I’m part of an event hosted by Walk Listen Create called Map Scramble 1, tomorrow evening at 7pm. This is the first of three events, which are all online and free to attend. Map Scramble 2, takes place on Wednesday 25th March, and Map Scramble 3, on Thursday 26th March. All three events have a variety of walking artists from all over the globe, presenting aspects of mapping in their work, and it should be a fascinating and illuminating three evenings.
The events are described by Walk Listen Create as:
“Prompted by the closing of the Secret Maps exhibition at the British Library, we invited members of the Walking Artists Network to present and discuss why they choose maps to document their walking art. This invitation was taken up by more than 20 walking artists, and it is with pleasure that we are offering to begin with, 3 Map Scrambles as we have labelled them, for as many of these walking artists to present their map work.”
I’ll be talking briefly about the second edition of Amniotic City, published in 2022 by Sampson Low Ltd, and how it evolved from the original map which was published in 2011.
You can watch the short film Alban Low made of me walking and talking about the second edition of Amniotic City below:
The two poetry maps I’ve published have been the most formal of my explorations via mapping but being a walking artist / psychogeographer means mapping is always part of the process somewhere in my writing and visual work related to place.
Sometimes these informal maps might cover a wide area of several miles and sometimes it will be a very small area. For example, with my walking project Sward, back in 2019, I walked a section of the central reservation of the A240 from Tolworth Roundabout to the border of Surrey, site specific, but important when taken into the context of the wider area.
This was my last piece of walking and writing about Tolworth, and took the form of multiple documented walks, finally becoming a chapbook, ‘Sward’, published by Sampson Low. This was launched as part of the Poets for the Planet Verse Aid event in February 2020, and where I was also invited to facilitate a couple of micro-workshops about place writing. Greg Freeman wrote a piece about it in Write Out Loud at the time which is here.
Sadly, the chapbook and my plans for it became a victim of the pandemic, which followed soon after. But I was very glad to have completed the project, I learned a lot about perspective and how we view places, and our assumptions about them. All those walks along that slim sward, with its tiny microcosm of trees and plants that I had known from afar, for all of my life, became very close in a way I never expected.
Sward was an important part of slowly saying goodbye to my extended writings about the area I grew up in. I also presented a paper about it as part of the Walking’s New Movement conference at Plymouth University in 2019.
At some point I still plan to do an Amniotic City walk but currently and for the foreseeable future I’m working on my Labyrinths project, and on getting my certification for the Labyrinth Facilitator training I completed in January.
I’ll be announcing a new series of Setting Sundays writing workshops this week to subscribers first, with a special early bird offer, so please subscribe if you want to hear about it before the news goes out to a wider audience!
Do you have any feelings about maps or do you use mapping in your own creative work? Let me know in the comments!
For now, it’s time to get out in the sunshine for a walk, and I hope it’s sunny where you are too!
Avanti!
Lucy