That little girl was me and the art work which resulted from this experience was the starting point for my reflection on walking. This Cornish pilgrimage became a series of seven triptychs which juxtapose an old family photograph, showing my brother, my parents and I, with my own digital photographs, pictures of my children, their father and myself when we returned to Cornwall (Fig. 1). Between the photographs of my brother and I and those of my own children, there would be an empty place, a childhood place. This place would symbolize the generation gap. However, at the same time it would reveal the anachronistic power of places. This work interrogates our relationship to the landscape, how we inhabit places and how these places hold us in their memory as we remember them in turn. My parents being true walkers, had well trodden the paths of the peninsula, my brother scrambling along ahead, and I bundled up on my father’s shoulders. Therefore, my body was experiencing these childhood paths yet again. While my body was engaged in movement, my mind was walking the paths of memory. Rebecca Solnit insists on the physical dimensions of memory and how it can be seen as a physical place in which we can walk: Memory, like the mind and time, is unimaginable without physical dimensions, to imagine it as a physical place is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached.2 As we wander along the paths of our past, we also walk along the neuronal paths that compose our memory. Furthermore, Solnit emphasizes the relationship between movement and memory, between our bodily engagement and the act of remembering. The French photographer Jean-Luc Moulène also decided to search for the small pebbles he had left behind him along the paths of Fénautrigues, his childhood village. Over many years (1991 to 2006) he returned to the vicinity of Fénautrigues and walked along the countryside paths producing an amazing collection of photographs and negatives, five thousand in all. In 2010 the French Ministry of Culture commissioned Moulène to produce an artist’s book in which he sat down
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Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, (London, Verso, 2002): 76.