The Walkies as Method:
My most recent work is tangled within my PhD research, examining the walkies as a method for a collective human-canine-landscape walking practice.
Who’s walking who? Re-connecting with our animal self in the unfolding landscape, through the praxis of walking with companion species
This research focuses on walking, with a canine companion, as an extension of aesthetic walking practice, and is informed by post-humanist philosophy and its application within the fine arts, through embodied autoethnographic walking methodologies.
Operating at the intersection of fine art practice, human geography, critical animal studies and ecology, my research seeks to reframe the humble act of the ‘walkies’ as a co-authored act of ‘making’ or ‘performing’ together. The ‘walkies as method’ offers a space where the human/canine has equal agency and where sensory limits complement each other in the generation of the walk, as an artistic event, through an active choreography, based on intuition, instinct and improvisation.
Building on previous experiments in Deep Canine Topography (O’Brien 2018), this practice-based research, seeks to integrate and develop the ‘walkies as method’ as a unique artistic process which helps us to rethink our entanglement with the more than human world, and the way in which we attend to the living landscape. By positioning the canine as co-author of the walk, I will explore new ways of moving through space, as a shared act, which attends to the unfolding landscape as a human/canine hybrid unit, building on the traditions of walking practices, that disrupt and unsettle geographies, by developing radical human/canine counter-cartographies.
Research can be viewed here:
These Twisted Animals Have no Land Beneath Them:
2018 – Immersive installation; Sound, lights, objects, text.
An examination of the relationship between humans and canines, navigating the infinite sublime together.
A Conversation for Robot and Fly:
2018 – Site specific sound installation in three acts, Birmingham School of Art.
We look out:
2016 – Digital print on acrylic
A post brexit vote reaction to a new fractured landscape and the rush towards re defined boarders and neofascism…
Do we need to know where we are to know who we are?:
(detail), 2016, Digital projection, scaffold, wood (Installation view)
A kinetic concrete poem directly informed by conversations with people in a state of flux, drawing on their memories of landscape, conflict, loss of agency, and personal quest for asylum.
From the Land to the Sea to the Sky:
2016 – video, duration 4 min for outdoor projection
Moving through water, moving through air and mindful gestures of a journey often taken but yet to be made.
From the Land to the Sea to the Sky, A Journey From Here to There:
2016 – Laser etched acrylic, projected digital drawing
A document of two day expedition from Thetford Forest to Sandringham, along the Peddars Way Roman Road, with my son Charlie, by bike, 8hrs cross country riding, in all wethers with only a small tent for shelter.
Sisyphus:
2015 – An experimental exercise in geographical triangulation.
One day, one human, one canine, three hills.
How Many Trees Make a Forest?:
2015 – 100 digital drawings, (Exhibition view), Ipad and Printed Card
2015 – The Line in the Landscape, (Exhibition view), Concrete and wax, 10” x 5”
2015 – Lino prints, (Exhibition view), 10” x 10”
2015 – Tree Data, spoken word, looped
An exploration into the coexistence of the built environment and the urban tree. With thanks to Attenborough Arts, The University of Leicester Curating and Museum Studies MA 2015 cohort and the Leicester City Parks and Trees department.
A Body in Motion:
2015 – graphite, lithium grease, pigment, mdf, string (site specific)
Part of the 2015 Summer Art Trail Residency, a work inspired by a journey along the Fosse Way Roman road from the High Cross to the High Cross.
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The Power of Falling Water – Without Horizon:
Moving image with sound, 2014
A two day journey of 56 miles, by bike and foot, following the River Soar, from its source in North Warwickshire to the River Trent on the Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire border.
All images copyright Darren O’Brien. All rights reserved.
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