WALKS 1–4 (Studio/Stage: Entangling private and public creative spaces through interdisciplinary composition - Portfolio)

Video works (2020–2021), 4 minutes (four 1-minute videos connected into a single work)Individual looping videos shared on Instagram:<i>WALK 1</i>: https://www.instagram.com/p/CQIlz5eALmR/<i>WALK 2</i>: https://www.instagram.com/p/CQI1uX1grr4/<i>WALK 3</i>: https://www.instagram.com/p/CQJEG6xAW0N/<i>WALK 4</i>: https://www.instagram.com/p/CQJT6Xpg7mD<i>WALKS 1–4</i> is a set of short video pieces created from documentation of local walks by three members of the Kaths Kaff collective – Jon England, Katie Hanning and me (Caitlin Rowley).In late March 2020, shortly after the start of the first UK COVID-19 lockdown, Hanning proposed that we use our government-mandated one-hour walks as a prompt for creative responses. This resulted in a great mass of documentation created by the three of us, which took the form of videos, photographs, field recordings, drawings and other media, all capturing different aspects of our daily walks in Somerset, Bristol, and Gravesend in Kent. Acting on a suggestion that emerged out of the group’s discussion early in the project, I brought these responses together to create <i>WALKS 1–4</i>, combining documentation and input from all three artists. Every element of these short video works uses a form of documentation from the initial project. Some elements from the project were used directly, as with the four videos showing pavement, a boat, a brick wall and vegetation blurred by the walker’s motion, and a squirrel leaping from tree to tree; others were reinterpretations of documentation contributed by one of the other artists. These reinterpretations include the animated frame that reveals the underlying videos, which I created as a digital translation of a technique England was using to document some of his walks with pen and paper, or my graphic score for the synthesiser part, which I based on frames from a night-time video contributed by Hanning. The result is a set of short, interlinked videos, designed to be shared both as 1-minute looping uploads on Instagram and as a connected set on other online channels such as YouTube.<i>WALKS 1–4</i> was followed by two more sets (5–8 and 9–12), which were commissioned by Electric Medway Festival in 2021 but which are not included in this portfolio.Videos © 2021 Kaths Kaff