We undertook local fieldwork in and around Mounts Pond. We set a deadline for the completion of traces a few weeks after that. Our prompts, chosen for optional orientation in our walks, were the following:
A pond, mooring in air. Carol Watts, from Mimic Pond Air has no Residence, no Neighbor, No Ear, no Door, No Apprehension of Another Oh, Happy Air! Emily Dickinson, from poem 989 (Franklin) things are vibrations that steady briefly their locality is variable a continual tending or tuning to the place Thomas A Clark, from Farm by the Shore
In a text generated after our afternoon on Blackheath, Carol Watts reflects on the months of daily visits to Mounts Pond that she made as she was writing her book Mimic Pond. Her walking in air leads her, via Hawthorne, Ponge and Ingold, to consider the palimpsestic life of the Blackheath ghost pond.
David Grundy’s text takes Blackheath’s history of hosting revolt as its point of departure. David considers the radical composer Alan Bush’s opera Wat Tyler and, in particular, the song ‘The Cutty Wren’. He describes his conversations with Carol and Emmanuelle, and how, taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin and Antoine Beuger, he starts to walk backwards, moving in a way that reveals ‘the indentations, the grooves, the stumbling points’.
Will Montgomery After walking for a couple of hours on Blackheath, Will Montgomery decided to record the sound of some bushes on Whitefield Mount. These had been damaged by fire. He attached a pair of contact mics and captured the sounds made as the charred twigs and leaves moved in the wind. The resulting audio work is intended, in the words of Thomas A. Clark, as a ‘tuning/ to the place’.
<a href="https://walkinginair.bandcamp.com/album/walking-in-air-on-blackheath-common">Walking in Air on Blackheath Common by Walking In Air</a>
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé Emmanuelle Waeckerlé offers materials generated in response to her encounter with Mounts Pond. Her text outlines her preparation for the walk, her reflections the evening after the event, and the words she improvised as she walked in air. A variable-speed video captures clouds and Emmanuelle from a fixed position on the ground; another video documents Emmanuelle’s circular walking as she paced the pond bed.
