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The Far North Queensland landscape provides abundant opportunities to engage with the natural environment. Wayfaring is an exhibition based on my walks in the local terrain through painting, with the aim to reveal insights into the often tacit, yet deeply meaningful relationship between self and the landscape. Through the painting process these artworks reimagine countless walks, including the physical undulations, movement, shifting perspectives, texture, colour and layered embodied experiences. The personal implicit understandings of the FNQ landscape are explored through materials and made visible to the viewer.

The use of walking as a creative approach responds to current lifestyle trends that are becoming increasingly sedentary and digitally based. The slow pace of walking acts as a counterpoint to such lifestyles by providing a period of calm to directly engage with the environment. Walking in nature allows both the feet and mind to wander, providing a platform for contemplation and ultimately deeper understandings of self, place and belonging to emerge.

The exhibition title refers to the writings of Tim Ingold (2011) who contends that: ‘Wayfaring is the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth. Every such being has, accordingly, to be imagined as the line of its own movement- or more realistically- a bundle of lines’. In reference to this quote, the drawn line has become a core motif of this body of work and through creative practice I have come to understand the meaning of wayfaring in the Ingoldian sense. This body of work endeavours respond in an authentic manner to my personal connection to the FNQ landscape that has been enriched through walking.