On Walking

Sampson, Ellen (2020) On Walking. Stimulus>Respond. pp. 18-27. ISSN 1746-8086

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Abstract

The film Things Floating in the Hudson: 11th July 2019 – a lo-fi mediation on the river that bounds the west side of New York – was developed as a psychogeography: an exploration of my embodied experience at a particular place and time. I am an artist who makes work with and about walking, using it to make performances, narratives, and objects. I walk across urban spaces and fields and occasionally trespass on other’s land. Watching the film, I cannot help but think about the hours I spent running along its banks last year, the solitary pleasure of body, pavement and air, and of the ease with which I moved through space.
The Hudson is 315 miles long, but this little stretch of it was briefly mine. Made nine months into a fellowship in New York, I walked and ran this paved stretch of shore almost daily-looking at old boats, considering but never playing mini golf, wandering to pier 45 to watch the milonga on Sundays. The river interested me, the way it carves and bisects the land – the tension between the urban and wild, the ways the tides both signify and embody change. In many ways it is unlovely, cleared of the boat yards and dilapidated warehouses where Alvin Balthrop once photographed trysts. Instead it is a municipal space of leisure – the detritus not of industry but instead of play – balls, water bottles, protective clothing. And yet the was often the sudden joy of the unexpected: a jolt of pleasure at meeting an object out of place.

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