(above: Steps by Mark Tweedie)

The pinhole photography of Mark Tweedie is stunning… I cannot be the only person that finds the images of places, and indeed the series of self portraits, atmospheric and haunting. I have never been to Dartmoor, but I have an imagination of the landscape shaped by things that I have read or perhaps even seen. The photographs in this series are fairly close to what I see in my own imagination.

On Mark’s website he also has a blog, and the articles are well worth a read. It was the most recent piece that drew me there in the first place, and one which – when I think about my own feelings about walking and the creative process – resonates in such a way that I really wanted to share it here…

A good day’s walk makes you feel like your heart has overflowed, that it cannot be contained by the physical confines of the body. It spills out into the trees and hills, it is carried in the wind, winds its way through the air-blown grass like a serpent, runs at your heels like a happy dog. Joy is impossible to describe, for what lifts me may not have any kind of effect on you. But when I walk I feel a part of the world and not apart from it. This sense mixes with everything, I mix with it and, quite literally, en-joy.

Walking, when done in the right spirit, is creative, or at least fills me with the same ineffable sense that something essential, something visceral is happening. It is a feeling that anyone who has created something satisfying will recognise. Moving across the world slowly – from a distance little appears to change, just as an artist’s pencil second by second alters the paper insignificantly – it feels like the landscape and the walker have at the day’s end become a manifestation of more than the sum of themselves.

Travelling on foot gives so much time for mental release thanks to its basic slowness. It creates a psychic momentum which carries one’s thoughts and emotions onward long after the stepping out is finished. It gives a mental space, an openness, which is ripe for fledging ideas and firming up reflections. There is so much in its inherent, rhythmical slowness which is essential to the emotive understanding of all kinds of issues, problems and inspirations. Much of this is also down to the being there, wind on face, earth under foot, straining, feeling muscle and sinew as they negotiate a passage through the elements. The physical engagement transforms everything, makes our sometimes leaden lives golden once more – the philosopher’s stone for those of us who by necessity live our modern lives once removed from the elemental.

Read the rest of Physicality and Art on Mark’s website here