On the 6 November the celebrated ‘walking artist’ Hamish Fulton will lead a communal walk in Helston and introduce a screening of the documentary Bringing Tibet Home.
Bringing Tibet Home follows artist Tenzing Rigdol in a project to bring 20,000 kilos of Tibetan soil to Northern India, bringing a small part of Tibet to a community unable to return to their homeland.
Tenzing’s work, which has been displayed in galleries across the world, has always been concerned with the land of the ancestors. In Bringing Tibet Home, he returns to the Nepal of his youth and retraces his family’s tumultuous journey from border town Kathmandu, a kind of waiting room for exiles desperately hoping to return to Tibet, to Dharamsa, India, second home to the country’s many political refugees. Subjected to scrutiny at the many checkpoints along the way, his trip is a reminder of the Tibetan people’s continuing struggle.
Hamish Fulton describes himself as a ‘walking artist’. In October 1973, having walked 1,022 miles in 47 days from Duncansby Head (near John O’Groats) to Lands End in Cornwall, he decided to ‘only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks’. Since then the act of walking has remained central to his practice. He has stated: ‘If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art.’
Calls for political justice recur in Fulton’s work, corresponding to his commitment to individual and artistic freedom. As Fulton has stated: ‘A diversity of art walks can interconnect with a wide range of actions, disciplines, philosophies, environmental issues, the meditative and politics’.
Fulton has devised group walks across the world. The first involved fourteen walkers at CCA Kitakyushi in Japan in 1994. In 2013 The Cornwall Workshop working in partnership with Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange invited him to devised two communal walks in Penzance, one of which is pictured above. The image shows ‘EAST WEST 2013’, a Hamish Fulton walk comprising 180 people divided into two equal facing lines, walking east, walking west in silence at arm’s length from midday to one o’clock at low tide on Penzance Beach, Cornwall, England, 20 October 2013.
Remember Nature 2025 is an ambitious new staging of the visionary art project initiated in 2015 by the celebrated artist Gustav Metzger (1926-2017), and curated by Andrea Gregson and Jo Joelson. A nationwide ‘Day of Action’ on 4 November marks the 10-year anniversary in partnership with 15 regional arts partners across England. Kestle Barton and CAST are both part of this national programme. On 4 November 2025 a series of talks and events will take place at Kestle Barton as part of Remember Nature.