Marsha Dunstan
Marsha Dunstan has donated two prints from her forthcoming artist’s book Permitted Walks (2020). She says of the project:
“In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the British government locked down the entire country from 23 March 2020, until its relaxation on the 13 May 2020. During this time the population was only allowed out of their homes for a few, very limited purposes that included ‘one form of exercise a day’.
I chose to walk and at some point every day I set out from our flat on the Isle of Dogs, London. I walked and walked, as if forward motion could comfort or make sense of the news, the numbers of dead, the strangeness and fear. Meanwhile, spring was magnificent, impervious to the invisible invader that had emptied out my everyday.
Walking gave shape to the days but at the same time it set up a persistent dissonance, a discomfort. I was walking to exercise my now very restricted physical freedom because a state of emergency had been declared: we were under deadly attack. Yet no bombs fell, there was no ‘damage’ to be seen. Roaming largely empty pathways and undisturbed streets, I realised my expectation of
disaster was conditioned to involve visible destruction. The words ‘disaster struck’ were always accompanied in news reports by violent images of war, famine, giant mudslides or tsunamis. The glorious weather only confused me further. Terrible things do happen on sunny days (why is this so hard to believe?).
Between walks, I consumed news compulsively, trying to comprehend what was happening all around but out of sight. Incidental indicators like the unmown parks and the increasingly shaggy and unshaven television reporters, doing their best from home with laptops, did as much as their stories to show that something was very wrong with the world as we had so recently known it.
As I walked on under blue and empty skies, it occurred to me that the territory I was marking out, step by step, may be my whole world for a long time to come. For so many of us, moving here all those years ago was meant to be the outward leg of a return journey, at least in theory, and the annual visit home was taken for granted. What would it mean to have only ever virtual versions of our family, our birthplace? Never again to be there. Over the 51 days, I walked 258 km with my camera. This is my diary: one image from my permitted walk per day and a front page headline from a national newspaper.”
Permitted Walks installed in AAU staff room at Newham University Hospital
