Listening to Landscapes
April 2024 - present
Over the past eighteen months, I’ve been moving through three green spaces in West London, leading walking workshops with Imperial Health Charity for people in cardiac rehabilitation. Together, we’ve lingered over what we see, shared observations, and listened, sometimes with ecologists, sometimes with local groups, letting social histories, memories, and small speculative imaginings mingle with our sense of each place.
The walks often become gentle ambles, with groups sharing memories, movements, and the encounters and sounds that sketch out alternative cartographies and reveal the subtle negotiations made at the edges and textures of a space.
Workshop prompts explore our relationship with space, returning, noticing, and reflecting, and often respond to the seasons. We note our favourite views, the warmth of the sun on our faces, the memories stirred by autumnal colours, and what makes us feel warmed in winter. We also play with the names of plants, objects, and animals, letting them reflect a memory, a feeling, or an association rather than a fixed label.
Ideas around reciprocity with nature, the history of environmental activism in the green spaces, and poems and texts by Alice Oswald, Mary Oliver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer thread through our time together, often read aloud as we walk. I also bring in fragments of social history research, stories that surface along our routes, such as the union history of Trellick House on our walk along the Paddington canal, or the listening perimeter at Wormwood Scrubs, inspired by the HS2 activism and legacies of Lesters Embankment.
These references become quiet companions to the workshops, adding texture to how we understand and inhabit the spaces we move through.
