Way/Find: Ellie Hannon

Way / Find presents a personal archive of impressions, investigating the thinking rhythms of walking and drawing. In this series, the material process of drawing mirrors movement through place and a quiet introspection. Rivers, tracks and paths of light oscillate between finding and feeling, sensing and seeing, moving and mark-making. They occupy the image similarly to the way that our bodies contain emotions.

Linked in practice, walking, and drawing both generate a rhythm of emotional mapping and un-mapping, where the physical passage of moving through a landscape echoes the passage of thoughts, as if the mind too is a landscape. Drawing becomes a process of remembrance, switching from intent to instinct, lines and marks assembled on the paper.

In the bush I notice temporality and unpredictability; cloud movements across the sky and their shadows carpeting the ground, a meandering insect mark etched on a tree, a confused line of ants zigzagging across red sand and a length of grass forming its own drawing as it moves in motion with the wind.

In the city, I notice random dirt trails that dart between the right angles of concrete and asphalt, a trace of city dwellers yearning for choice. The tension that exists between nature and the urban environment is seen in these slowly eroding desire paths, where a soft emerging autonomy contrasts with the hardness of infrastructures. I see my freshly landed footsteps contribute to this act of choice, certain and deliberate, written over earlier foot-tracks in the dust.

I know the paths that I trace are not the only paths, and that walking brings me choice. As the path, time and events unfold, walking becomes a metaphor for navigating the complexities of the world; walking is a natural action, an investigation of the world without being consumed by its tensions.

- Ellie Hannon