Connections

Lead Artist – Allenheads Contemporary Arts, with additional funding from Killhope Lead Mining Museum

Connections explored how walking can become a shared artistic practice through which people develop deeper relationships with landscape, heritage and one another. As lead artist, I devised a programme of participatory walks that used slowness, attention and collective experience as creative methods.

The project brought together two distinct walks. Walking the Leadscape, developed with artist Steve Cousins, invited participants to experience the lead-mining landscape through carefully choreographed acts of attention, including blindfold walking, molehill archaeology, slow movement, shared observation and conversation. Rather than explaining the landscape, the walk encouraged participants to encounter it differently.

The Botanical Walk and Drawing Workshop focused on the metalliferous plants growing around Killhope Lead Mining Museum. Through slow walking, magnified observation, plant identification and drawing, participants explored the close relationship between geology, mining history and the remarkable species that thrive in contaminated ground.

Connections extended my interest in walking as a research method beyond my own practice. It explored how sustained attention can be cultivated collectively, creating opportunities for people to experience landscape not simply as a backdrop or heritage site, but as something encountered through curiosity, care and shared presence.