The Walking Score Sculpture You is an act of becoming, an ongoing process of altering your senses and to reflect upon the attention, respect and care you invest while walking the sculpture trail. During the first act you transform into a temporary sculpture. During the second act you perform a ritual in front of each sculpture on the trail. For each of the acts, read through instructions prior to doing the movements.

Score originally made for the Sculpture Trail at Stephens House and Gardens, 17 East End Road, N3 3QE London, United Kingdom. 

Plain air exhibition/sculpture trail
Dates: 1st – 9th September, 2024
Exhibition: The Sky is Moving Sideways Curator: Rebekah Dean

Twelve national and international artists takeover selected locations and you are invited to walk the trail using the specially designed map.

Laura Morton Griffiths and Rebekah Dean

Laura Morton Griffiths
Laura Moreton-Griffiths (British, b. 1967) is an artist, writer and filmmaker whose storytelling seeks to challenge dominant narratives and offer different experiences of history. Her work has been exhibited in London and nationally and is held in private collections in the UK and internationally. She was selected to participate in Year of Making, SPACE Clarence Mews (2022); DOOResidency, Amsterdam (2021); PeerSocial, Raven Row (2020) and Cubitt Gallery (2018–19) and London Creative Network programme at SPACE, London (2017). In 2021 Future’s Venture Foundation supported her writing of speculative fiction. She co-prgrammes Her Art-Story, conversations between female artists, curators, producers, gallerists, critics and art writers. Moreton-Griffiths received her MA from Royal College of Art, Contemporary Art Practice: Critical Practice, London. She lives and works in London, England.

Rebekah Dean
Rebekah Dean (British b. 1958) cross-disciplinary London Artist Curator, working in live and visual arts, and combining both practices in order to challenge and engage audiences. She uses the activity of walking for sustaining creative practice, and was a selected presenter at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco (2024), for her project ‘Walking & Drawing as Socially Engaged Practices in Relation to Site and Wellbeing. “As I age, I notice an absence in my extremities, and walking becomes the method I use to tune into my body’s potential as a creative material. I remember more deeply, I visualise and know my internal landscape more clearly; my unique neurodivergent perspective recognises the body as its point of reference”. 

She was artist in residence 2024 at the Björkö Konstnod (BKN) in the Stockholm Archipelago, and her performance ‘Game Care’, which explored designated game care sites of the Stockholm Archipelago, in relation to notions on patriarchy, was selected for the SUPERMARKET Art Fair in Stockholm, April 2024. She was a recipient of Arts Council England funding for the curation of the 2024 Sculpture Trail, ‘The Sky is Moving Sideways’. 

1. Stand with collected feet. Arms and hands along your side.
2. Lift your right arm to the side with your palm facing downwards.
3. Lift your left arm to the side with your palm facing downwards.
4. Stand still with both arms at the height of your shoulders and slowly turn both palms towards the sky. Remain with palms up. Take 4 deep breaths
5. On the 5th breath wiggle both hands before you slowly lower your arms. Meet the sculpture in front of you.

Repeat 1-5 in front of each sculpture

BERG DUO –  move between studio based and the outdoor practice. Walking is an integral part of their work. It intersects lens and embodied practices, towards reconfigurations of subjectivity by visualizing possible futures. Concepts of in-between and the state of becoming are central and their work is relates to artistic research oncare, proximity, and responsibility.

Berg Duo works at the intersection of interdisciplinary (walking, lens and embodied art practice and theoretical inquiry. Ami Skånberg and Anna Viola Hallberg are based out of Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden. They have a fellowship studio at Björkö through BKN. This has been the site where they instigated the walking program WAP.

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“The Walking Score, SCULPTURE YOU, was performed as part of The Curator’s Tour for The Sculpture Trail, ‘The Sky is Moving Sideways 2024’, and was made available to the public on the back of the trail’s free colour map. It took place at Stephens House & Gardens, a North London, grade two listed mid-Victorian museum building, with ten acres of landscaped gardens, and a history dating back to the thirteenth century. The score was performed by myself, and the Artist Laura Moreton-Griffiths, and written especially for the trail by the Swedish Artists, BERG DUO. The trail was funded by the Arts Council England.

Act 1 of the Score was presented at the beginning of the trail tour, on the main footpath leading up into the gardens, with the Artists standing opposite each other, at a distance of approximately 2.5 metres apart, the audience were nearby in close proximity. The visiting public were able to walk freely in between the two performers.

Act 2 of the Score was performed throughout the tour, on arrival, and in front of each of the 11 Sculptures on the trail. 

Nine ephemeral Sculptures all by women artists, were curated on the trail alongside the two permanent Sculptures both by men artists, that reside at Stephens House & Gardens. Sculpture no. 1, ‘A Conversation with Spike’, was where the performance for Act 2 of the walking score began.” Rebekah Dean, curator of The Sky Is Moving Sideways.

“The Unfold – In Conversation” later known as “The Thread of Scores“. What if we hence having no funding just would move a head and share. The first three scores is a result of walking together. Walking as art form. We did this in the program WAP at BKN in 2023. As we make a Walking Score we hand over the act of doing to others. What is it that we hand over? How do we think about this act? What comes forward? Can we by the relay support each others practices and embark on grounds not treaded before in our practice? Can we facillitate the development of our own practice by doing a project with in another on? If we do so what happens?

The relay of performed walking score in its original edition will create original walking scores by artist from various disciplines. The curatorial format asks one artist to hand over to the next artist and so on. In 1-3 months post the original performance the originator and performer meets to have a conversation about the score. The below listing unfolds as the relay develops. The concept forms a link between artists and initiates a conversation on walking scores and the experience of walking a score to open up a dialog on scores and on modes of production. We initiate this process by handing over the score to another artist to perform. However the idea of the score is not to be for that artist only but for others to also do.

The video was made at the Orange Gardens in Rome Italy as a compliment to the instructions. The set up in the orange gardens across the street where the artists had their accommodation (Circolo Scandinavio, Swedish Institute in Rome). The garden has a a number of stone podiums providing for the artists not to do the score infront of sculptures but rather becoming sculptures and doing the gestures of the score.

Above video: Instruction video to curator Rebekah Dean. Score performed by Berg Duo.

Above: Folder for “The Sky Is Moving Sideways” . “Sculpture you was made especially for this plain-air exhibition.

Sculpture Trail /Sculpture You funded by Arts Council England
THANK YOU!!!