Film and Video Umbrella

PUBLICATIONS

The Memorial Walks

The Memorial Walks celebrates a unique project, in which artist Simon Pope invited a series of writers to memorise a scene from a landscape painting, which they would then be asked to recall while out walking in the open country. Continuing the exploration of memory and place at the heart of Simon Pope's multi-disciplinary practice, this artist's book acts as a 'field guide' to the seventeen different walks that made up project and features recollections from well-known literary names such as Geoff Dyer, Iain Sinclair, Hari Kunzru, Trezza Azzopardi and Tom McCarthy.

Pope's project, 'The Memorial Walks', first commissioned for the exhibition 'Waterlog', which was shown to considerable acclaim last year in Norwich and Lincoln, involved seventeen writers memorising a particular painting from a local museum, and carrying its image (of trees, or other rural, woodland scenes) with them out in to the flat, apparently featureless landscape of Norfolk and Lincolnshire.

Once out walking, each writer was asked to stop at a point along the route, and recollect the painting from memory; their painstaking attempts to render their elusive subject in words then recorded as a short audio file that acted as a ghostly echo of the painting itself, displayed elsewhere in the gallery.

The writers for Memorial walks are from all walks of literary life, and include novelists Hari Kunzru, Geoff Dyer, Iain Sinclair and Tom McCarthy; art critics Brian Dillon and Sally O'Reilly; poets Sharon Morris and George Szirtes; nature writers Rex Hancy and Susannah Paisley; geographer David Matless, ecologist Ken Worpole and journalist Stuart Jeffries.

This beautifully designed, pocket-size publication, part field guide, part artist's book, acts as a record of the project. Alongside an introductory essay by project curator Steven Bode, it chronicles the seventeen walks through maps, photographs and other marginalia, and features transcriptions of the writers' recalls of the paintings, as well as the paintings themselves.

Published by Film and Video Umbrella, 2008

Associated Publications with :

Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition