Walking art: Sustaining ourselves as arts educators

Abstract

Abstract Through a year-long collaborative practice of walking as art, three artists/researchers/teachers investigated embodied perception in terms of its capacities for self-sustenance. Amidst the rush and routine of busy lives, familiarity with feelings of potential as the nourishment sustaining bodily movement is often forgotten. However, in immersive practices such as walking, conceptual categories are not as significant as the positions and orientations that postures address, and the degrees of potential bodies feel in assuming these postures. Perception derives its sustenance in a social awareness at the level of the body where availabilities for next movement are generated by sensations of a world in movement already underway. The repeated aesthetic experience of practice-generated potential in every bodily repositioning grounds philosophical matters of perception in this study. This article describes our enquiry into the integrating capacities of walking art for feelings of relational aliveness and it includes both poetry and visual art as part of the study.