Catching Sunlight in glass sphere

Place Time Material: UPCOMING EXHIBITION

June 11, 2021

A series of works created by an international group of walking artists, involving interviews and conversations, artwork created in response to a walk, Landlinks, and to landscape and attachment. Selected works will be exhibited by Ground Works 17 – 27 June at the Three Storeys art centre and gallery in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. My artworks for the project span drawing, sculpture, text and photography. I will be at the gallery on Sunday 27 June 2 – 4pm if anyone is in the area and would like to call in and say hello. Am looking forward to seeing all the works together too after a year of virtual connections and creativity.

Ground Works Exhibition Flyer

I first became involved in the Landlinks project at the start of lockdown in the UK, walking together but apart with an international group of walking artists on 22 March 2020. We followed a series of prompts from Ground Works, and communicated through WhatsApp, responding creatively both at the time and following the walk. Due to COVID-19, the planned exhibition was delayed until now. This had the added benefit of extending the projects into a series of interviews, conversations, and new artwork. Images and interviews are on the Ground Works website, including images of my work for the project and In Conversation, an in-depth interview from my hammock, in which I spoke about the walk, my creative practice and processes, politics, environment, books, and swimming in rivers. It’s one of the more personal interviews that I’ve done, maybe due to the pandemic shifting everything to the private spaces of our homes and local area, and also to a sense of urgency in the need to respond to the climate crisis.

Catalogue Pages for RuthBroadbent: Ground Works Exhibition 2021
Exhibition Catalogue Entry

I was also invited to create a work for the exhibition in response to Landscape and Attachment. For this part of the exhibition, I am exhibiting two drawings inspired by a series of works that came about from playing in rainwater puddles in the garden during lockdown. They are slowly growing into a wider exploration of place, through a series of map-like drawings of puddle worlds, which are both real and imaginary. I am reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and phenomenology of the imagination in the way that I can travel in my imagination from a small garden puddle to a world of large expanses of land and sea. As each drawing changes, there are slight shifts in land and sea boundaries and borders, echoing the impact of political and climate changes.

Walking as part of a group or collaborative project with walking artists has become a valuable part of my process in recent years. I have found it frees me up to experiment and try new approaches to the way that I use walking in my creative practice. It has also led to conversations with other artists and networks that would not otherwise have happened. The Landlinks walk involved some of the artists who also participated in another project that I took part in, From Town to Countryside. I am currently planning an online walking drawing event for Walking as a Question International Encounters / Conference in Prespes, Greece. For this event, I will extend my Walking a Line: Encounters Through Drawing activity that I created for Made of Walking (La Romieu, France) to connect walking artists in Prespes with others around the world. More on this soon.

Landlinks Walk 22 March 2020: 3 photographs
3-d works on plinth (in studio)

With many thanks to Kel Portman and Lizzi Walton for bringing us all together and for curating the exhibition.

Update (Nov 2021) :

A photographic work from my Landlinks series can be viewed online alongside other walking drawing works at #WalkCreate Gallery 1.