Walking the Leadscape

Collaboration with Steve Cousins

Walking the Leadscape (2025) was an expanded, immersive artist walk devised in collaboration with Steve Cousins as a training experience for National Landscapes. The project explored how walking-based artistic practice can support attentiveness, sensory awareness, and ethical engagement with landscape.

Participants were guided through a sequence of slow, site-responsive actions designed to awaken all the senses. These included poetry readings in situ, the use of viewfinders and magnifying glasses to focus attention, and collaborative making around a former mine ventilation shaft, where a temporary artwork was collectively constructed in response to the site.

The walk incorporated moments of silence, shared observation, and sensory exchange, including taste and smell. The experience concluded with a reflective gathering around a burning log, where participants shared locally foraged wild garlic soup and discussed the walk as a form of evaluation and collective reflection.

By combining performative walking, shared making, and communal rituals, Walking the Leadscape demonstrated how creative practice can function as a training tool for landscape professionals, encouraging slower, more attentive, and relational ways of working with land.