FRIENDLY REMINDER: if you click REPLY to this email, you will be sending a message to over 300 subscribers. Please do so only if you wish to respond to everyone.Dear FolksWild Ryde, my recently completed doctorate re the memory and experience of a walk and return swim across suburban Sydney, is now online:I'm hoping to publish it – and would appreciate advice any of you might have in that regard.Here is a spiel to whet your whistle, and the Abstract…Wild Ryde is carefully woven, leavened via an inquisitive spirit and 250 images (a hundred are mine). Fondness, humour, anecdote and irony rub shoulders with fact, fiction, philosophy and rumination upon walking, swimming and 'the pace of place'. Academic garb is loosely worn, made palatable via an engaging novel-like 'through-line'. Like the contemporary English observer A de B, I have dreamt of and attempted at times 'a kind of writing that might report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective, and a bit peculiar'.Last week I spoke about Wild Ryde|swimming home at the ANU School of Art's symposium 'Talking the Walk/Walking the Talk', in Canberra: http://soa.anu.edu.au/event/talking-walk-walking-talk - some most interesting presentations from a diverse range of artists and curators.AbstractIn 2007 I completed a meandering two-year pilgrimage on foot across Sydney, from my home in urban Rozelle to suburban Dundas, where I grew up. In 2011 I swam home. Discombobulated and increasingly remote from the local at a time of ever-faster global connectivity, I had felt the need to re-acquaint myself with my ‘country’, the seemingly bland ‘relaxed and comfortable’ mortgage-belt municipalities of the Parramatta River corridor. Walking west from the city via Victoria Road I immersed myself in a suburbia laced with three generations of my family, seeking out strands of lost and lesser-known cultural fabric. Whilst acknowledging the flâneur and the work of more recent walking artists, my path echoed increasingly with antipodean walking traditions: those of aboriginal people, early settlers, artists and swagmen. At the core of my journey lay a quest for memories I felt that I should, but did not, possess. This latency, which also has infused my photo-based studio work, is pursued, teased out and examined in the chapters which follow. In the midst of a golden age of plenitude here in the South (when most of us lack only time) I have demonstrated, to myself at least, that by slowing to a walking pace and immersing oneself physically in local place, by following one’s nose hither and thither, it is possible to re-enchant one’s locale, one’s ‘country’. Wild Ryde is a municipal embroidery, an idiosyncratic local emotional history. Born of six years’ practice-based creative research and experimentation, the dissertation is my means of making home, and an artwork in its own right.Onwards and regardsDavidDavid Watson44 Callan streetRozelleNSW 2039Australia
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