MY BLOG - VISUAL ARTS PRACTICE 1

Lines by Tim Ingold

After viewing Ingold's presentation`Hanging Out in Teacher Education: Walking, Drawing and Extending Sites for Learning – a collaborative transdisciplinarity approach to curriculum reform',  I was inspired to read the introduction and chapter 3, `Up, across and along´of his book 'Lines'.   What I read challenged my way of thinking across a range of academic fields, some I am familiar with and others not so much. Importantly, it gave me a new perspective on how to look at walking which is the topic of my art work for this module.

 

Ingold links a number of disciplines in a very unconventional way.  In this short essay, I would like to focus on the topic of walking and how Ingold sees its significance in his theory of lines.  Walking, he says, has much in common with other human activities, it moves along lines and lines are everywhere.  We produce lines wherever we go and in what we do.  Ingold in his book, ties these activities together into one research area:  line-making.  

 

Life, Ingold says, is lived along paths rather than static places.  People have to walk from place to place and in doing so create lines or pathways.  Along these pathways, stories are created and people get to know the landscape and what is in it.   Pathways may start as sutle lines but can soon develop into highways which link places of habitation.  These places are like dots that lines link together. Ingold refers to the dots as `nodes in a static network of connectors´(p75).   In our modern world walking has been replaced by other modes of transport and as a result has changed the concept of place.  However, people still create their own invisible lines as they walk through the cities.  

 

In writing about `Trails and Routes´on p75, Ingold tells us about how the Inuits see the landscape as ´a mesh of intertweaving lines´because as soon as someone starts walking they are creating a line.  This is very easy to see in snow when tracks are made with bootprints.  He goes further by explaining that for the Inuit the one creating the tracks, and the line he creates are one and the same - `life happens while travelling´.  This idea is not isolated to the Inuits but was probably true for all of humanity before the concept of city-based civilisation was developed. We can see that many of these ancient pathways are still used today although often for a different purpose.  For example, on Gran Canaria, many routes made by the indigenous Canarios are now walking paths enjoyed by the tourists who go there to walk.  

 

There are two types of travel for Ingold, wayfaring and the `transported traveller´(p77).  There is a very clear distinction between the two. The wayfarer moves his body by walking from place to place and does not necessarily have a destination whereas the traveller who uses a means of transport has a destination in mind.  The latter also travels along routes and only experiences the surface of the landscape whereas the wayfarer really sees and feels the world he inhabits.  Perhaps no group of people know more about the land they inhabit than the Aborigines of Australia.  Roy Wagner, mentions on p79, when talking about the Walbiri, that `the life of a person is the sum of his tracks'.  Ingold makes a profound statement on p81 when he says that ´Wayfaring, I believe, is the most fundamental mode by which living beings both human and non-human, inhabit the earth´.

 

Ingold goes on to link storytelling to lines.   The stories of our lives are made as we walk along lines and therefore stories are intricately linked to lines.

 

I want to finish with the quote above as for me it is one of the most significant quotes from the chapter.  I agree with Ingold when he says that life is lived along lines and that wayfaring is basic to the way we live on our planet.  I think that it is for these two reasons and for many more, which may or may not be mentioned by Ingold in the rest of his book, that walking is becoming an important part of people's lives again.  We evolved to walk and to move. The world is a wonderous place and it is by walking we see the beautiful wonders of it.  It is by doing this that we feel alive and our stories take on new meaning.

 

Reference

Ingold, T. (2007) Lines:  A Brief History, Routledge