Doing art and doing cultural geography: The fieldwork/field walking project1

With accompanying examples of initial visual experimentation from the fieldwork/field walking PhD project, the paper outlines some of the challenges of being an artist and using systems of understanding from science, the new ethnography, and cultural geography as a framework for making contemporary art. The PhD project is in its preliminary stages and is designed to explore the area of walking and fieldwork in art, and as art. Some of the challenges are the ambiguous role of the artist as scientist, ethnographer and researcher, the role of reflexivity in art practice; and the pitfalls of 'academic art'. While cultural geographers have used artworks as texts to explain places, this project endeavours to work with issues of place, landscapes, power, identity and representation in the art, to feed back into this dialogue. The bulk of the project will take place in the Kimberley region of Western Australia where the concepts of wilderness and wildness are most relevant. The research question posed by the fieldwork/field walking project is: within the discourse between art and science what is the connection between fieldwork and walking in the field?