Line(s) of Enquiry is a collaborative project between Walking the Land and the University of Gloucestershire’s Hardwick Gallery with an exhibition of artwork, writing, research, and exploratory materials presented at Hardwick Gallery between 3rd March – 27th March 2025. Alongside the exhibition a symposium is planned for Friday 21 March 2025. Providing an opportunity to share more widely, and discuss in greater depth, outcomes from the project. This could include respondents from a variety of University departments and/or invited guest speakers and will be presented to a public audience, offering a launch point for new connections and further lines of enquiry.
Walking the Land artists will be responding to the Honeybourne Line, a former freight and passenger railway that brought in goods and connected Cheltenham to the wider region and beyond during the last century. Members of the group that live further afield in Stroud, Cirencester, Oxfordshire, Cardiff, Somerset and Edinburgh, have been invited to locate and engage with a linear route closer to home that resonates with the brief, in a form of linked study to bring another layer of research and contemplation to the project and will also feature as part of the exhibition and symposium.
Entwined with over a century of social history, traces of former life are abundantly evident. Line(s) of Enquiry will enable us to demonstrate the value of artistic research by looking beyond a track’s use and purpose to understand the lines being explored through their ecologies: as topography, as habitat, as archive, as carrier of histories, as living museum, as network, as a place of movement, pause and transient encounters.
Artists will engage with their Line(s) of Enquiry collectively through a series of shared seasonal First Friday Walks which also serve as research and stimulus for their individual creative responses. Generating engagement, dialogue and knowledge exchange through these shared walks, artistic practice and action research. Bringing a multi-disciplinary approach to consider the many possible lines of enquiry these tracks now present.
As a thought experiment, Line(s) of Enquiry allows us to consider these redundant railway lines as uncharted territory, to peel away what we know and reveal that which is made visible. The project can be understood as a ‘halt’ within the timeline of these lines, an opportunity to analyse the organisation of spatial, temporal and social fields of action at a particular point in their existence, specifically with art as the driver/producer of new knowledge, as a means to permeate the status quo, and develop spaces for critical engagement, affective encounter, and relational learning in the everyday.
