About Us

Walking the Land is an artists collective that has been active in Gloucestershire’s Stroud Valleys since 2002 and more recently has active members from wider afield. We link landscape, community and art through projects, research, exhibitions, installations, writing and shared walks with numerous artists’, other professions and wider communities. 

We have been leading communal walks on the first Friday of every month since 2004 and since 2019 have developed online cafés on the last Tuesday of the month. Our projects and multi disciplinary dialogues often bridge community, private, academic and public sectors, involving people in landscape decision making or other public policy while developing us as practitioners and creating new knowledge.

In 2024 Walking the Land became a Community Interest Company (CIC), this new status will allow us to expand our projects and deepen our commitment to fostering exciting and meaningful connections between people, places, and nature through walking and creative practice while creating new knowledge and allowing us to develop as practitioners. 

Walking the Land Directors

Richard Keating – A founder member since 2002, Richard has a background in landscape design, woodland management, community forestry and sustainability facilitation. His MA in Drawing as Process focused on Time and Place and his practice led PhD studied the potential of art walking to engage communities with landscape decision making. 

Andy Freedman – For 50 years Andy has  walked and spent time outdoors, taking groups to places where they can connect  with nature through  all their senses.   He’s contributed  to WtL projects including the Laurie Lee centenary, Confluence, Field Walking  and Growing Places. His work includes photographs and film as well as poems and song lyrics, much of it about the natural world.

Rachel McDonnell

Ruth Broadbent – Ruth is an artist, educator and the founder of walk.draw. Her creative practice is inspired by nature and ecology, lines of landscape, and line in drawing and sculpture. The process of walking and movement is central in the way that she creatively responds to place. She is a member of drawing, walking and ecology artist networks.

Zoë Ashbrook – A multidisciplinary artist, Zoë’s process-led practice is anchored in observations of time, landscape, nature and memory through sensorily immersive experiences of place.  Working with expanded notions of drawing, printmaking, moving image and sculpture to explore concepts embracing our human connection with entwined temporalities of landscape.

Walking the Land support team

Our dedicated support group help ensure the ongoing availability of our First Friday Walks and Last Tuesday Cafés. Anyone is welcome to help and if you would like to get involved we would love to hear from you. Please email us at wtl@walkingtheland.org.uk

Lucy Guenot – Lucy has been part of Walking the Land for 15 years, making drawings as a regular attendee of the First Friday Walks. Lucy is a printmaker & member of the Gloucestershire Printmaking Cooperative (www.gpchq.co.uk), where she teaches letterpress printing. Since May 2023 Lucy schedules and co-ordinates the First Friday Walks.

Tamsin Grainger – Tamsin joined Walking the Land in 2020, making mixed media art work in response to the First Friday Walks and other projects. She led the ‘Roll of Emplacement’ project which was exhibited as part of Convergence Divergence (2023). She is a walking artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Edinburgh.

Tamsin manages the Instagram account for Walking the Land (@walking_theland) and helps to organise the Last Tuesday Cafés.

Valerie Coffin Price – Valerie is a Welsh artist whose work deals with the environment, language and cultural identity; working with poetry, literature and landscape as inspiration, source material and content for her practice. Part of this involves an immersion in the landscape through walking, she has been a member of Walking the Land since 2010. She regularly leads First Friday Walk’s and supports the Facebook accounts and/or helping organise the Last Tuesday Cafés.

Walking the Land Project Champions

Janette Kerr honRSA PPRWA – An artist deeply embedded in place, Janette is a painter of  northern landscapes, working at the interface between land, sea and historical experience. Walking is integral to her practice. With Walking the Land she has created and lead the ‘Solargraphic’ and ‘Convergence/Divergence – A Walk in Seven Pauses’ collective projects as well as contributing to, and leading First Friday Walks.

Caroline Morris