My Own Private Odyssey

Words Sophie LovellDate 21 January 2022

As the shimmering lights and hum of festivities retreats, we thought it the perfect time to present this collective odyssey where we invited artists, writers, and designers from around the world to develop creative expressions resulting from walking near their home base—in whatever medium they choose. It is a visual experiment about what happens in the mind while walking and how we respond to inspirational impulses such as memories, shapes, landscapes, and interactions.

Melissa Schriek 

Amsterdam

When Melissa was a child, she wanted to be a detective, “so I could satisfy the enormous curiosity I carried for the world and people around me.” As an adult, she took up her camera instead. Drawn by her recent series called The City is a Choreography, we asked Melissa to further investigate the streets of her hometown. This image is called The Bump and features dancers and best friends Christina Mastori and Susan Hoogbergen. “When I roam the streets,” Schriek tells us, “I create moments  that say something about the way we, as inhabitants, relate to the city and to others, often strangers, that live there too.”

Sunjoo Lee 

Eindhoven

Seoul-born artist Sunjoo Lee recently created a piece called Machine in Flux—Wood, where a robot made drawings of tree rings in ink by responding to changes in light, wind, temperature, humidity, and sound. For our odyssey, she reprogrammed or “de-machined” her robot, allowing it “choose” its own path for a seven-hour “walk” in her studio. It literally takes a line for a walk by responding to a live feed of sounds from an endangered rainforest that is part of the SAFE Project in Malaysia. In the line peaks on the paper, says Sunjoo, “you can see the moments of birds chirping and all the noises that the insects make.”

Elena Helfrecht 

Bavaria

Growing up in the Bavarian countryside, local folklore and landscapes have powerfully influenced this German artist’s work, alongside psychology, literature, and art history. Inspired by the oneiromancy traditions of her matriline, this latter-day Artemis goes out to hunt with her camera during the longest, darkest nights of the year, when magic is said to be at its strongest, “to visually examine this ancient lore and tradition while contemplating past events and new beginnings, and reconnect with my family, childhood memories, and my female lineage.” Her resulting work is as full of portent and enchantment as any ancient legend.

Nico Krijno 

Western Cape

Nico lives in South Africa, in a small village called Stanford. It is a bucolic, poetic setting next to a river close to the Whale Coast. “Of course, I would love to dance along! A walk a day is therapy for the soul!” he says, when we ask him to join our odyssey. For the subject matter, “I was thinking of connecting the ocean and the river pictorially in a walk as a line of exploration,” he adds. Nico’s work is a collection of prints of his own and found material, which he then collages live onto a scanner bed as it is moving, like a pictorial DJ. These collages he made for us are his “mixes” of that 20-kilometer walk from his village to the sea.

Julian Knox 

London

Julian Knox, aka Julianknxx, is an interdisciplinary visual artist, poet, and filmmaker. His family fled civil war in Sierra Leone for Gambia when he was nine years old, before later settling in the UK. In his practice, he uses his personal history as a prism through which to deconstruct dominant perspectives and explore themes of inheritance, loss, and belonging. After we discussed the odyssey project, he went out walking around his neighborhood and through London under lockdown to write this poem. “I walk and listen to my eyes, legs, and heart to find new language and imagery,” he says, “the magic in the ordinary and the beauty in our day-to-day.”

Sofie Keller 

Scottish Highlands

This Copenhagen-based artist is a recent graduate from Glasgow School of Art. While there, she developed a project called In Search of Getting Lost in response to long solitary walks in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. “These walks have been a search for terra incognita—unknown land—as a mental experience and a reflection of the idea of lostness and the unknown,” says Sofie. Questioning her position as a woman in the landscape, and the common masculine narrative of the explorer, Keller’s powerful photographic images shift topography and orientation, magnifying the sense of the sublime in this dramatic environment.