KATE COLLYER

Walking and mark-making have long served as methods of knowing place. Wayfaring — the act of traveling by foot — connects us to our environment and, subsequently, to those who walk the same paths. My practice weaves printmaking through this act of moving, asking how we come to truly know a place, and what it means to bear witness to it.

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At the center of my research is a single question: What are the methodologies in an expanded printmaking practice that generate the embodied sense of place more fully? I call the answer Ambulatory Aesthetics — a methodology built on three interdependent acts: the walk, which produces sensation; the print, which preserves its trace; and participation, which carries that meaning across many bodies, many subjectivities, many encounters with the same terrain.

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"Wonder is one of the most powerful forces with which we are born," writes Erling Kagge. This wonder is the tether that has propelled me through ice-filled fjords and along desire paths, those unofficial trails worn into terrain by collective passage. The lands that anchor my practice are connected by the International Appalachian Trail, which traces the ancient Central Pangean Mountain Range. These are places of common territory — once joined, now separated, still speaking the same geological language.

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My practice develops a visual language that translates temporal experience into lasting artistic impressions. Central to this is the indexical nature of the print: not a direct representation of place, but a material trace or precipitated encounter within it. A footprint pressed into soft ground, organic matter fired into glass, a mark left by a body moving on-trail — these are all indexical records that testify to the presence of the thing that made them, transforming ephemeral encounters into permanent artifacts.

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I work where psychogeography, phenomenology, and topophilia meet. Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan, I understand place as something built through repetition, memory, and the orientation of the body in space. In Ambulatory Aesthetics, each element carries one of these: the print holds repetition, participatory practice holds memory, and the walk orients the body. Together, they do not depict place — they enact it.

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The resulting prints and participatory practices invite individuals to venture into their own territories and return material traces of their passage — collected, pressed, preserved, and redistributed. Through this marriage of movement and marking, I aim to demonstrate how artworks can do more than represent the land — they can enact it, leave their mark upon it, and invite others to do the same.