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Walking mindfully involves being present and absorbing the multisensory experience of bipedal movement. Taking time to reconnect with our surrounding natural environment can counter increasingly fast paced and often-sedentary urban lifestyles. It can also afford the time and space for thoughtfulness and imagination to flourish, which may reveal creative insights into new ways of seeing the world.

This series of paintings investigate how the embodied and meditative experience of walking can be conveyed in terms of paint and enrich understandings of self and the landscape. Various walks throughout the unique local Cairns region inform each piece with attention given to the colour, geography, distance and both the physical and psychological space experienced.

These compositions explore shifting perspectives such as form aerial to ground level and internal wanderings to the external. Capturing the essence of being present and movement of walking was a key motive. The French philosopher Frederic Gros describes the feeling experienced after a day of walking in nature eloquently. This was a thought that was reflected on throughout the painting process:

Close your eyes and feel on your body the layers of landscape dissolving and recomposing….. the colour of the sky, the flashes of leaves, the outlines of the jumbled hills. –Gros

Trilogy is an exhibition at KickArts Contemporary Arts Cairns of three artists investigating three varied topics through differing mediums: Migrancy – Walking – Persona. The artists delve into their topics through practice-led research that involves a considered balance of studio play and theoretical underpinnings. This approach of reflexive and reflective inquiry pushes the artist into a challenging space of new discoveries and ideas. Trilogy exhibits the work to date of ongoing PhD research at James Cook University.