In late March 2020, shortly after the start of the first UK COVID-19 lockdown, one of the members of Kaths Kaff (Katie Hanning) suggested that we use our government-mandated one-hour walks as a prompt for creative responses. This resulted in a great mass of responses by Katie, Caitlin and Jon England, which took the form of videos, photographs, field recordings, drawings and other media. Looking at this rich record, Caitlin wanted to bring these responses together, creating a work which combined material from all three artists. The result was WALKS 1-4, a set of interlinked one-minute videos designed to exist both as a connected set and as one-minute looping uploads for Instagram.
Since then, the project has extended, currently standing at 12 one-minute films. WALKS 5-12 were commissioned in 2021 by Electric Medway festival.
Materials used in these films are
- videos by Caitlin (1, 2, 9, 10), Jon (3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11) and Katie (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12)
- animated drawing mask based on Jon’s unconscious drawings (digitally re-enacted by Caitlin) (1, 2, 3, 4)
- long exposure photographs taken by Jon (9, 10, 11, 12)
- field recordings by Caitlin (all)
- sound from Katie’s videos (1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11)
- synthesiser tracks realised by Caitlin on a ROLI Seaboard Block using a graphic score she made from a night walk video made by Katie (all)
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WALKS as a set reflects on repetition, ritual, limitations of time and space; these videos collectively suggest that they are just a fragment of a longer experience – both the walks themselves and of the potentially limitless responses to them.
Our thanks to Electric Medway and their supporters for commissioning WALKS 5-12 in 2021.
