Walking Libraries AD
This evolving materials library explores the language of site-specific phenomena in conjunction with geological and spatial narratives. Objects and handmade tools are used to prompt further crafting initiatives related to the environment and atmospheric conditions.
Initiated in 2016 as a movement arts project with a social practice component, Walking Libraries has expanded into a visual lab archive that addresses the nature of plots and terrain in this era of climate breakdown/crisis.
An interview featuring Walking Libraries in Moowon journal appears here.
“The artist considers a walk, or any type of site-specific interaction, as a means of archiving; presented as collections of carefully sculpted and polished found objects.
Abigail Doan’s project Walking Libraries reveals still and sterile arrangements through which we get to read into a dynamic and natural process of documentation.
By contemplating the texture of a landscape and the specific elements of that particular space, the artist rebuilds a narrative that explores one’s cooperation and confrontation with nature.”
– Radu Sticlea
Guest curator for ArtConnect
“It is not only the loss of natural resources and altered terrain that we might now be collectively mourning, but also the loss of mystery in places that once seemed so vast and uncharted that we might lose ourselves and find solace, however complex and daunting the journey. How might mystery and the non-quantitative also be restorative? Why do we need to feel this re-enchantment with/in nature and how will we continue to simulate and sustain this engagement as time passes?”
– artist quote for
Incantatio Mundi, Romanian Creative Week 2022