Walking in Air on Blackheath Common
26/05/2025
local fieldwork around Mounts Pond, collective recollection (online).
With David Grundy, Will Montgomery, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Carol Watts
a dry Mounts Pond
We undertook local fieldwork around Mounts Pond on Blackheath Common. The pond was completely dry. on 26 May 2025. This is a site that Carol had visited daily for months in the period when she was writing her book Mimic Pond (Shearsman, 2024).
We met for a recollection later that afternoon, and, after we had generated traces in response to our walking, again in September online.
We set a deadline for the completion of traces a few weeks after that. Our prompts, chosen for optional orientation in our walks, were the following:
A pond, mooring in air.
Carol Watts, from Mimic Pond
Air has no Residence, no Neighbor,
No Ear, no Door,
No Apprehension of Another
Oh, Happy Air!
Emily Dickinson, from poem 989 (Franklin)
things are vibrations
that steady
briefly
their locality
is variable
a continual tending
or tuning
to the place
Thomas A Clark, from Farm by the Shore
recollection (online) - 15/06/2025, 6pm
I whistle walked and improvised words as I stood still and walked in air in and around the empty pond. This became a variable-speed video capturing the clouds from a fixed position on the ground; another video documents my circular walking and talking as I paced the pond bed.
All traces of this ‘Walking in Air’ fieldwork are available on the Walking in Air website.
Walking in Air
An interdisciplinary project that encompasses walking, writing, thinking, music, performance and discussion. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s suggestion that ‘knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world’, the project considers walking in air to be a model for speculative thinking, for creative activity and for reconsidering our place within the natural environment. Participants are drawn from an international pool of composers, artists and poets.
A collaboration with Will Montgomery building on the rich body of poetry-music-environment encounters generated by the tradition of text scores inaugurated by the Fluxus movement as well as as composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveiros and Annea Lockwood to name a few.