Miranda Whall

I have been making up a series of on-going stories for my 8 year old son called ‘Willow Lane’. I always introduce a character by Beatrix Potter, the evening before this crawl the character was Mr Jeremy Fisher. I have never forgotten the deep impression that the story made on me as a child; the stickleback, minnows, galoshes and his very watery ‘splish splosh’ house. So while plundering belligerently and delightfully through streams, mud and the water logged sheep paths he of course was at the forefront of my mind.

This crawl was my favourite so far. I felt a sense of utter abandonment, pure unadulterated joy as I splashed my way uncaringly through the watery low lands of my 5 1/2 mile route. Stumbling over hillocks of earth and grass, getting lost in the recesses, to appear again wetter and happier each time.

The Go Pro footage is exciting as it periodically reveals a frenetic world under the surface of the water and there is a sense of urgency and even violence as the cameras on my limbs get caught up and strangled by the long grass.

The core, the weight and volume of my body is absent in both documentations of my experience. I am a series of disembodied limbs in the Go Pro footage and a blurred blob of white in Hannah’s photos. The substance of me is absent in both. The landscape is the subject, I am the object from which, because of which the landscape is seen.

I am becoming more and more aware that in every aspect of this project I am a facilitator, the sheep/human is a porter – collecting and carrying cultural, social, political and environmental data, and the result will be a mediation between music, poetry, writing, science and imagery.

Trying to represent my embodied experience is impossible and so futile, my experience is simply to facilitate new experiences from and beyond my body.