Walking the Leadscape

Collaboration with Steve Cousins

Walking the Leadscape (2025) was an immersive artist walk developed with Steve Cousins as a training experience for National Landscapes. Rather than presenting information about place, the walk invited participants to experience landscape through attention, curiosity and shared exploration.

Working with a sequence of slow, site-responsive activities, we encouraged participants to notice through all their senses. Poetry was read in situ. Viewfinders and magnifying glasses shifted the scale of observation. Around a former mine ventilation shaft, the group created a temporary artwork in direct response to the site. Periods of silence, shared observation and sensory exchange allowed participants to experience the landscape beyond its visual qualities.

The walk concluded around a burning log, sharing wild garlic soup made from locally foraged plants. The conversation that followed became part of the work itself, offering a space to reflect on walking as a creative practice and on how slower, more attentive forms of engagement might influence the ways we care for and work with landscape.

This project marked an important development in my practice. Having spent years exploring how sustained attention transforms my own relationship with place, I became interested in creating situations where others could experience that same process for themselves.