About Running

For a long time, I didn’t really talk about running in relation to my art.
 It was there, of course. I ran through the landscape that inspires me — the lanes, hedgerows and holloways of North Cornwall — returning to the same places again and again, in different weather, different seasons and different states of mind.
 But somehow I kept these two parts of my life separate.


Until yesterday.
..

I added my running URL to my art Instagram and then later made some changes here on my website most notably becoming "Artist Educator, Runner" and it felt surprisingly significant. Almost as though I was finally acknowledging something that has been there all along.
 I think I have, in a way, come out as a runner!

Running has a huge impact on my art practice.
 When I run, something happens to my attention. I've noticed a paradox in that I am moving, but also becoming strangely still. Like in meditation I tune into the rhythm of my body — feet, breath, heartbeat — which seems to quiet everything else and opens me up to what is around me.
 The shape of a hedge, the twisted roots of a tree, a particular green against a particular grey, the way a road disappears around a bend. The illusion of running through a tunnel shaped by trees. Changing light, wind through grasses, bird song, something half-seen... 
I don't run looking for things to make art about, but I often see things that stay with me.


Running has changed the way I experience landscape because I don't simply observe it from a fixed position. I move through it. I experience it physically, repeatedly and intimately.
 Sometimes I lose any real sense of where my thoughts end and the landscape begins and it is in that stillness within movement that the magic happens. 
An image appears. A colour combination lodges somewhere in my mind. A feeling remains long after the run has ended.
 Later, in the studio, I might not remember the landscape literally. Instead I remember fragments — movement, atmosphere, rhythm, space, something half-remembered or imagined. 
This feels closely connected to the way that I draw, paint, and make marks. I am interested in what happens when observation moves beyond representation; when a landscape becomes less about depicting a place and more about exploring how it has been experienced, remembered and transformed. 
Perhaps this is why I am drawn to working with media that moves, runs, pools, blurs and behaves unexpectedly. 
Running and art making may be different activities, but they have become part of the same way of looking.


Running gets me into the landscape, making art brings me back to it.
 One is movement and the other is stillness.
 It is a way of looking and experiencing and a way of remembering and also imagining. Running has always been a huge part of my creative practice and yet I'd never quite said so.