Chain Walking, 2025

Chain Walking, 2025.
Digital photographic documentation of walking/chaining experience.
Crofton Downs, Wellington, NZ.

Chainwalking (2025) was created through a series of repeated walks through the suburban landscape, slowly knitting wire chains that unfolded one stitch with each step I took. I am not a knitter, so at first my attention was firmly focused on my craft, and I rarely looked up except to check my footing.

Over several clumsy kilometres, my dexterity became almost autonomous, allowing me to look up and be present with my surroundings for more sustained periods. As the chain grew heavy around my neck, I noticed how virtually all the mailboxes screamed ‘NO JUNK MAIL’ (or variations of it), and how the grass was far coarser underfoot than back in Wales.

The interaction between site and walking generated a syntax through which thoughts, emotions, and encounters organised themselves in real time—amplified, and almost choreographed, by the restraint imposed and gradually released through learning a craft. The resulting object became a wearable trace of my embodied experience, and the conditions became a metaphor for the slow emergence of attunement to the latent life of my locality. The deeply absorbing and connective qualities of the walks felt palpable.