Walking Home: The path as transect in an 800km autoethnographic enquiry

This practice-based project articulates the notion of an autoethnographic transect using Walking Home, a particular journey that I made in 2009, as its foundation. Borrowing key terms from the fields of ethnography and ecology, the project articulates a new contribution to knowledge by expanding the notion of a transect and using methods appropriated from autoethnography to generate visual arts practice in the wake of a long distance walk. Walking from London, England to St. Gallen, Switzerland the journey was undertaken in the wake of my father’s death.

The key principle this project takes from autoethnography is that the position of the emotive self, as researcher and researched, can offer unique insights into a given field. Methods borrowed from autoethnography and ecology are re-employed throughout a transdisciplinary practice and body of research that, through the development of an ecological from of subjectivity, articulates an autoethnographic transect. The project expands the scale of a transect, from a line drawn across a field, to a journey taken across Europe; one that is drawn, walked and talked into being.

Walking Home is presented in a holistic form whereby contextual and critical work is interwoven with and within practice: writing, image making, performance and installation. This interwoven process, whereby the practice and research become an inherent part of each other, is exemplified through a body of work called Fondue, a performance, taking place as a dinner party, which has evolved out of my engagement with autoethnography. An exhibition took place in Spring 2015, the outcomes of which are folded into this thesis. Articulating the notion of an autoethnographic transect as a new method within the field of visual arts practice this thesis will be of interest to performance practitioners, artists and writers engaged with the field of walking as a form of practice or process.