In December 2024, DRAW Space will present Group Show / WALK WITH ME, an exhibition by nine artist-researchers who use walking as a deliberate strategy to reveal and disseminate new knowledge.
The exhibition will open at 6pm on Thursday 28 November. Join the artists and DRAW Space team to celebrate.
Once the primary mode of transport, part of the continuum of human history, walking in the First World is now consciously chosen, an act of resistance against loss of time, space and embodiment. Since the 1960s, when art transitioned from object-making to an investigation of ideas, valuing process over product, opportunities arose for the artist to see the body as a medium and walking as an ordinary activity from which the extraordinary can be derived.
Curated by walking artist, Melinda Hunt, WALK WITH ME will present six projects that foreground preoccupations with and responses to habitat loss and species extinction, connection with urban ecologies, the colonial project, artistic and scientific activity centred on walking, and site-specific atmospheres, among other concerns. Each project generates drawing as an output. To find out more about individual projects, read the artist statements below.
WALK WITH ME features the work of:
Alexandra Crosby, Ilaria Vanni, Sarah Jane Jones and Holly O’Neil
Melinda Hunt
Luca Idrobo
Linda Knight
Kiera O’Toole
Mia Salsjö
The exhibition runs from 6pm on 28 November to 5pm on Sunday 22 December.
Public events
WALK WITH ME includes an exciting public program of walking events and activities during which participants are invited to join the artists in exploring surrounding suburbs on foot and contribute drawings to the exhibition.
EVENT 1: WATER WALK Saturday 30 November, 9.30 am – 12 midday
Join the team from Mapping Edges – Alexandra Crosby, Ilaria Vanni, Sarah Jane Jones and artist Holly O’Neil – on an ethnographic walk tracing the flow of stormwater from DRAW Space in Newtown to the wetlands at Sydney Park. Bring drawing materials. Space is limited to 12 participants.
EVENT 2: CITIZEN CENSUS Saturday 7 December, 11 am – 2 pm
Join Linda Knight for a brief conversation at DRAW Space before setting out to document your own Citizen Census. Collect a folded map and a pencil from the gallery and walk around the neighbourhood following instructions on the map. A Citizen Census might document the weather, litter, graffiti, birds or insects, for example. Return your map to generate a Citizen Census Archive of the Inner West and contribute your map to the exhibition. No booking is required. This activity can also be undertaken on your own at any time during the exhibition.
EVENT 3: DISOBEDIENT WILDLIFE DRAWING WALK Sunday 8 December, 10 am – 12 midday
An ibis explores a bin; cockatoos walk alongside business executives; magpies swoop prams in playgrounds. ‘Disobedient wildlife’ refuse to remain unseen in Sydney, often occupying spaces where they ought not to be. Join anthro-artist, Holly O’Neil, and bird-watching guide, Jade Peace, of ‘Come Bird With Me’, on a walk through the Sydney Park Wetlands to spot the unruly critters of Sydney, exploring how drawing on location can help to tell stories of place, and allow us to see and investigate the layers of history and habitat around us. Meet at the Brick Chimneys at Sydney Park at 10am. Booking link to come.
EVENT 4: DRAWING WALKSHOP Saturday 14 December, 11 am – 4 pm
Join Melinda Hunt for an hour or a day at a Drawing Walkshop. Meet other artists and talk about walking and drawing. Go out into the surrounding suburbs to create drawings that respond to what you can see, hear, and feel. Add your works to the exhibition. Bring your favourite drawing materials and paper. Basic drawing materials will be provided. No booking is required.
Group Show / WALK WITH ME presents:
Wetland Trajectories: Alexandra Crosby, Ilaria Vanni, and Sarah Jane Jones together with anthro-artist Holly O’Neil
For the exhibition WALK WITH ME, Alexandra Crosby and Ilaria Vanni and Sarah Jane Jones have created three ‘photo diagrams’ researched through walking ethnographies of Sydney Park.
Alexandra Crosby and Ilaria Vanni have worked together as Mapping Edges for over a decade. They combine walking and mapping methodologies to guide people to connect with their neighbourhood ecologies. In this project, they work with award-winning visual communication design researcher Sarah Jane Jones to map the water trajectories intersecting in Sydney Park’s constructed wetlands and visualise them as a working landscape.
Photo diagrams are a technique to move between photography as descriptive documentation and documentation of non-representational dimensions. They can bring a visual communication perspective into debates on conveying the non-representational in visual form, and in this way contribute to making wetlands legible in urban environments.
Working alongside the photo diagrams, Holly O’Neil’s work invites us to question the seen and unseen, with more-than-human actors interrupting the gallery space. The disruptive nature of the work is a reflection of these disobedient critters: a call to look closer at those around us and the stories that the inhabitants of the city can tell us about the layers of history and habitat around us.
On Saturday 30 November Crosby, Vanni and Jones will lead a public walk entitled Water Walk. Over 2 hours, participants will trace the movement of water under the surrounding suburbs concluding at Sydney Park. O’Neil will join the walk to work with participants to record evidence of hidden waterways and more-than-human inhabitants discovered along the way. Registration required - see link above. Maximum 12 participants.
On Sunday 8 December, join anthro-artist, Holly O’Neil, and bird-watching guide, Jade Peace, on a walk through the Sydney Park Wetlands to spot the unruly critters of Sydney, exploring how drawing on location can help to tell stories of place, and allow us to see and investigate the layers of history and habitat around us. Meet at the Brick Chimneys at Sydney Park at 10 am. Booking link to come.
This project is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP240101955). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Research Council.
Biographies
Alexandra Crosby, University of Technology Sydney. Her research is on more-than-human design, recombinant ecologies, and emergent forms of design activism. She is a co-founder of Mapping Edges Research Studio.
Ilaria Vanni, University of Technology Sydney. Ilaria is a Sydney-based interdisciplinary researcher across design and the social sciences. She is interested in how design and material culture shape the cultural, social, and political dimensions of urban environments. Her current work focuses on enhancing urban ecologies amid the growing impact of climate change on cities. This involves a deeper exploration of how people, nature, culture, and urban spaces interact. She is a co-founder of Mapping Edges Research Studio.
Sarah Jane Jones, University of Technology Sydney, is a Lecturer in Visual Communication. She examines ways to incorporate storytelling into urban wayfinding design – central to this is exploring the relationship between physical signage and digital wayfinding. She recently won the Jon Rieger Awards Program For Exceptional Graduate Student Work In Visual Sociology.
Holly O’Neil’s work spans creative research, illustration, audio and film, to weave narratives that explore the intersections of science, art, anthropology and storytelling.
Visit the Mapping Edges website.
Maps of Being: Melinda Hunt
Living and working on Gadigal Country in Sydney’s Inner West, my drawing practice is an exploration of forms of thinking, feeling and knowing. I draw while walking as a distinctive strategy that brings perception and visualisation to the fore. What do I know of my surroundings in the moment of encounter and how is this shaped by memory? My drawings, therefore, are not about things or places or myself but about the relational space between them and the energy created in the interstitial.
Drawing is an economical process well suited to transferring one reality into another, the transference is immediate. Walking mostly at night without a prescribed route, I am a human seismograph, a proprioceptive device moving in space while responding to my surroundings. I walk and draw with both hands while wearing a harness to hold my drawing board and carrying drawing materials in my pockets. The marks I make are unmediated and unexpected, an affirmation of my sensorial attentiveness and presence in the world.
For WALK WITH ME, I will exhibit two- and three-dimensional drawings and a video from the Maps of Being series.
Public event
On Saturday 14 December, 11am-4pm, I will lead a Drawing Walkshop during which participants make walking drawings in the surrounding suburbs that will be included in the exhibition.
Biography
Melinda Hunt has a BFA in Printmaking (2019) and an MFA in Drawing (2021) from the National Art School in Sydney where she now works as an educator, teaching life drawing and experimental drawing. Melinda is a founder and co-curator at DRAW Space, an ARI on Enmore Road in Newtown that provides a platform to make, see and experience contemporary drawing. She is an active member of the Australian Walking Artists network and has a studio in the Railway Street Studio complex in Petersham.
Luca Idrobo: Love Letters to Walking Art and Science
Hermes, god of fickleness and protector of wanderers, and one who moves across boundaries performed an ambiguous miracle in Eutropia: its habitants embraced otherness, constantly moving from one city and role to another, becoming someone new when boredom struck. Reading this in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I began to understand something about myself, about my moves across academic and artistic fields, unable to remain in a single role—flirtations of the in-between, a stepping from muddy terrains into moving vessels, the fluidity of my many living, dying and reborn existences. While I cannot always define myself as just a sportsman, musician, writer, psychologist, philosopher, art historian, photographer, artist, or second-class world citizen, on occasion, one of them takes the lead in the performance.
My artistic practice often diverges from my academic research. I primarily work with photography, frequently paired with creative writing—both prose and poetry. I tend to create in series, some conceived spontaneously, others meticulously planned. Some series take only a short time to complete, most evolve over months or even years, allowing themes to develop lives of their own, visiting me when they wish or vanishing for good. Generally, I gravitate toward minimalism, temporality, and surfaces. There’s a certain beauty and intimacy in surfaces that invites experimentation and allows me to experience otherness.
At times, my art and academic research intersect, benefiting from each other while maintaining their distinct paths. However, they rarely overlap as profoundly as they do in my recent exploration of drawing. Love Letters to Walking Art and Science is a cumulative piece that honours pivotal artistic and scientific works focused on walking as both motif and practice. This series merges photography, drawing, and light-drawings, creating a tribute to the intersection of movement, art, and enquiry.
Biography
Dr Carlos Idrobo (also known as Luca Idrobo) is a multidisciplinary scholar and artist based in Finland, with expertise spanning psychology, philosophy, and art history, as well as music, creative writing, photography, and drawing. His education includes a degree in Psychology (Universidad del Valle, Colombia, 2014), a Master of Arts in Philosophy (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, 2008), and a PhD in Art History (Universität Greifswald, Germany, 2017). In Finland, he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä (2020–21) and the University of Turku (since 2018). His research focuses on the arts, hermeneutical philosophy, and psychology from the nineteenth century onward, with a particular emphasis on walking as a motif, performance, and interpretive strategy in art. As part of his Hermeneutics of Walking project (2021–2023), he curated the Walking Abstractions workshop-exhibition on walking and drawing in Rovaniemi, Finland (2023), in collaboration with visual artist Kalle Lampela. In his youth, he trained in classical guitar and singing and was active in a university writing circle. Alongside his academic career, Luca has worked as an artistic and documentary photographer and writer, contributing to independent and collaborative art projects across Colombia, Germany, Switzerland, and Finland. Some of his broken dreams include competing in a world championship for artistic gymnastics, becoming a professional tennis player, a concert guitarist, and a university professor.
Linda Knight: Big Cities – The Citizen Census
Through drawing and critical stitching, I create inefficient mappings of colonial histories. My mapping practice is an experimental protocol for attuning to the complexities of histories, narratives, complicities, and place and their multiple dimensions.
Walking is a connecting practice for many of my inefficient mapping works, and in Big Cities, I subvert the act of census-taking to inefficiently map population density. I often work with Big Data, experimenting with information extraction and translation from large databanks. Big Cities disrupts the careful capturing of Big Data in a census through multiple, random citizen census records that capture the more-than-human citizens of a city:
cats, dogs, birds, insects, spiders, their markings and occupations
plastic objects, wrappings, bags, pieces
wind, rain, heat, sun
numbers, officiated signs, graffiti, posters
Big Cities provokes us to question the population density of cities when we map all the diverse citizens in them.
Public event
On Saturday 7 December between 11am and 2pm, visitors can join Linda for a conversation before taking a folded map and pencil from the gallery and walking around the neighbourhood, following instructions on the map, to create a citizen census. Return the map to generate a citizen census archive of the Inner West and add your drawing to the exhibition.
Biography
Using drawing and critical stitching practices, Linda Knight explores the possibilities of experimental cartographies as a reparative practice. Linda’s international profile as an award-winning artist and theorist includes transdisciplinary, experimental mapping projects that critically explore mainstream counter-narratives of colonial histories and devised Inefficient Mapping as an investigative practice.
An Associate Professor at RMIT University, Linda is Director, RMIT Mapping Future Imaginaries research network www.mappingfutureimaginaries.com This global multidisciplinary network creates projects focused on our future lives and the world.
Kiera O’Toole: Documenting the ‘Spatialised Feelings’ of Everyday Spaces
Echoing John Muir’s sentiment, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” my work explores the idea that where we are matters; we are always emotionally affected by our world, even if we are not consciously aware. Combining fieldwork with material and philosophical research, I make experimental documentaries to record the ‘spatialised feelings’ of places and spaces in which we occupy. I aim to draw attention to the pre-reflective and affective dimensions of experience, rooted in the idea that our surroundings continuously influence us, My work engages with broader social, environmental, and cultural contexts, aiming to reconnect us with who we are and where we are in a more holistic manner.
In this work, I recorded the emotional vibrations of Taree and Wingham, both in rural New South Wales, Australia. Through drawing in situ, I recorded everyday atmospheres and their specific spatialised emotions, rather than my private inner emotions, thus revealing my entanglement with the world. Atmospheres are more than mere meteorological stats or backgrounds; they profoundly shape our lived experiences. The documentary is presented as an experimental stop-motion animation that blends AI with analogue drawing using under-the-camera techniques and felt map drawings. Also included is a public participation project titled “A Field Guide to Documenting the ‘Spatialised Feelings’ of Everyday Spaces”, 2024.
Biography
Kiera O’Toole is a visual artist and current PhD candidate at Loughborough University, UK. Her practice blends philosophical inquiry with experimental and expanded drawing, including site-specific works, installations, and stop-motion animations. In 2023, O'Toole exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland, Onkaf Art Foundation, Mumbai, and Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Ireland. In 2024, she is exhibiting at prominent galleries, FRISE in Hamburg (GER) and DAS ESSZIMMER in Bonn (GER), both funded by 'ZEITGEIST 24' Culture Ireland.
O’Toole's extensive exhibition record includes shows at the RHA, CCA Derry-Londonderry (NI), University of Newcastle (AUS), National Museum of Australia, Maitland Regional Gallery (AUS), Mount-Kuring Regional Gallery (AUS), Art Walk Porty (SCO), and in Ireland including The Model, Courthouse Arts Centre, Leitrim Sculpture Centre, DLR Lexicon and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre. Her residencies include Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre, and Sligo Arts Service.
Her publications feature book chapters such as ‘Drawing Wonder’ in "Project Anywhere IV" (University of Melbourne and Parsons School of Art, NY, 2021) and 'Drawing from the Non-Place' in "Body, Space, Place in Collective and Collaborative Drawing: Drawing Conversations II" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). O'Toole has presented at conferences including The Institute of Global Irish Studies at the University of NSW, the National Museum of Australia, Loughborough University and Coventry University UK, and Maynooth University, Ireland.
O’Toole is a professional member of Visual Arts Ireland and the Drawing Research Network (UK), and co-founded the Irish artist collective Drawing deCentered.
Felt Map: Taree and Wingham, NSW, Australia, 2024, gestural drawing with AI- extended line, graphite, acrylic, ink, coloured pencils on paper, digital footage.
Mia Salsjö: Himalaya Hillary Norgay Trail, 27 days
While I now live in an era of 24-hour online connectedness, it is with a sense of fortune that I look back to a time when it was still possible to go entirely off-grid and to walk in near-total solitude. Such was my experience in 2009 traversing the famed Hillary and Norgay trek in the Sagarmatha region of the Nepalese Himalayas. The trail is named In honour of Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzin Norgay who first climbed Mt Everest in 1953, making this one of the great iconic walks. Starting at Jiri in central Nepal, the 60km trek goes via Namche Bazaar through incredibly contrasting terrain, before terminating at Everest base camp, some 5,364 metres above sea level. For 27 days, I trudged my way towards the sacred mountain, with no particular company save for the two local guides whose language I did not speak. Motivated by grief, the sheer exertion and daily focus that such rugged terrain demanded helped empty me of the distress that I had otherwise found overwhelming. The two walking sticks that I used each day were steadily ground away, the symbolism of which I found more than prescient.
Reflecting on that sojourn, I later produced a series of tightly wound rods, bound with the bright colours associated with the Tibetan prayer flags seen on the higher Himalayan passes. Wending my way amidst the towering boulders and crevasses, one minute in the blazing sun, the next in freezing shadow, my sanity was gradually centred in the moment. Neither narratives past nor imagined futures were of concern. More than serving a symbolic function, the wrapped poles, which I selected for this exhibition, are meditative reflections on the process of journeying, especially those adventures enacted via the old-fashioned method of placing one foot in front of the other. The objects are a reference to the Buddhist ringing staff, the khakkhara or what the Tibetans call the འཁར་གསིལ། 'khar gsil’ that one sees in India and Nepal. The stick has rings at the top and is supposed to make noise to ward off predators but over time it also became a musical instrument. That feature is especially lovely as really, all of my artmaking is a prelude to writing music, so this too is a score of sorts. It just exists in silence like when I’m walking.
Biography
Mia Salsjö is a Swedish-Albanian-Australian artist. She grew up in Melbourne in an extended family that included her maternal grandfather, a high-ranking government official and dissident refugee who opposed the repressive measures of Albania’s Enva Hoxa regime, Irena, her ballerina mother and father Peter, a Swedish rock musician and successful fashion designer. Under the guidance of her paternal grandfather, orchestra conductor Stig Salsjö, she learnt to read music from a young age, later graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in music improvisation. Her subsequent degree in visual art led Salsjö to arrange numeric systems, visual art and music into complex multi-disciplinary works and performances. Mia is also a graduate of the internationally accredited Kundalini Research Institute; alongside her ongoing art practice, she teaches Kundalini Yoga as Joti Tajgeet Kaur. She lives in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick with her partner, writer and curator Damian Smith and Pixie their much-loved Miniature Pincher.