Walking the South West Coast Path in Cornwall

least once a year I try to disappear for a few days and walk somewhere on my own. No schedule, no expectations, just walking, observing and making art. Over time I’ve realised how important this kind of solitary travel is for my practice. When I’m alone, I can move at my own pace. I can stop whenever something catches my attention: a shift in the light, the sound of wind moving through grass. There’s no pressure to keep going for someone else’s sake. That freedom to slow down, listen properly and draw has become an essential part of how I work.

The starting point for my MA major project came from a solo walk along sections of the South West Coast Path in Cornwall and along the St Michael’s Mount pilgrimage route. Spending long stretches walking alone created a kind of extended immersion in the landscape. Gradually I became more aware of small changes, the way the light moved across the sea during the day, the huge swell of high seas against the rocks, the subtle and not so subtle shifts in weather from the Atlantic. I also became more conscious of my own physical and emotional responses to being there: tiredness, exhilaration, quiet attention.

But during this process I encountered an unexpected problem. Walking is such a bodily, immersive experience, yet when I returned to my sketchbook the work often slipped back into familiar landscape viewpoints, the static “view”.

Realising this was a turning point in the project. At first it felt like I had failed to translate the experience of walking into the work. But instead of dismissing it, I began to think more carefully about why it was happening. I started to understand that “the view” isn’t simply a limitation, it is also a way of orientating myself. A viewpoint is provisional and situated rather than absolute. The challenge, then, wasn’t to eliminate the viewpoint entirely but to place it within a wider sensory and embodied experience of landscape.

This led me to begin experimenting with the materials around me. I started drawing with ink using sticks, feathers and grasses gathered along the path and using puddle water or rock pools to dilute ink. These small shifts in process changed the way the drawings felt. They became less about describing what I was looking at and more about responding to the conditions of the place itself.

Because of this, the way I evaluate the work has also changed. I’m no longer asking whether the drawings move far enough away from representation. Instead, I’m interested in whether they carry something of the lived encounter of being there, the light, the weather, the movement, the physical act of walking.

In many ways, the walk became less about reaching a destination and more about learning how to pay attention.