The Memorial Walks

17 writers take paintings of  trees into memory. Walking into the fens of East Anglia, each writer recalls the image, overlaying spoken-word descriptions over the contrasting landscape. 2007/8

For the ten weeks of the Waterlog exhibition in Norwich, ten different landscape paintings from the Castle Museum collection were hung in the gallery, all but one of them veiled with black silk.

At the beginning of each week, a different painting was unveiled, and an audio recording of a walk undertaken in the company of a different writer, made available on the project's website. These record each writer’s attempt to commit the designated painting to memory and recollect it in detail, out in the open countryside.

This process was repeated in Lincoln with seven more writers taking the memory of different landscape paintings, depicting trees,  with them into the fens.

• Read the Waterlog catalogue essay by Steven Bode here. (2008)

• Read a brief description and reflection on the project here (2010)

An online record of The Memorial Walks is available here.

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, London for the exhibition Waterlog. 2007-8

• The following participated in the work:

  • Trezza Azzopardi

  • Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton

  • Brian Dillon

  • Geoff Dyer

  • Nicci Gerrard and Sean French

  • Rex Hancy

  • Amanda Hopkinson

  • Stuart Jeffries

  • Hari Kunzru

  • Tom McCarthy

  • David Matless

  • Sharon Morris

  • Sally O'Reilly

  • Susannah Paisley

  • Iain Sinclair

  • George Szirtes

  • Ken Worpole

Press

• The Call Of The Fens by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian (2007)