Merri Creek

For the last 15 years I have been walking daily at the Merri Creek. Two different locations from two different houses. Even though I have walked the same path many times, every walk is different.



In 1992 I went to an exhibition in Edinburgh at the FruitMarket gallery, which I found very inspiring. The exhibition was called Poiesis. The exhibition explored contemporary links between poetry and the visual arts. A number of artists contributed to the exhibition.
I brought a small book by the artist Thomas A. Clark who was in the Poiesis exhibition. It is called In Praise of Walking, the title to a body of work exhibited in 1988 at Cairn Gallery. This small book was a reflection on the act of walking. I have carried this around with me since then. Here are some of his words:

Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world.

It is quite possible to refuse all coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away.

That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering.




There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves.

A journey implies a destination, so many mines to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.

There are things that we will never see, unless we walk to them.




Walking is a mobile form of waiting.




What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.

...Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant.

...The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement.








...We can walk between two places and in doing so establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends.

There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to myself again.




the day these photos were taken, it had just rained.