The walking studio: The art of wayfaring

This article considers walking as a wellness intention, a creative act and a form of community navigation within lived environments. The walking studio situates a walk as a form of art-making – mapping lines of travel using photography, spoken word list poetry and field recordings. Walking as reflective inquiry also accompanies movement through civic life and what is encountered en route. The author proposes that walking can express active citizenship, agency and the moving subject within their everyday worlds, thereby engaging the social, environmental and political within the act of walking. The walking studio, as a portable art form, has the potential to access new routes of life by traversing unfamiliar territories which extend people into new situations and pathways. This article will also describe attributes of CHOICE (Challenging Health Outcomes/Integrating Care Environments) an arts and humanities research project situated at Ulster University (Northern Ireland) tackling mental health disparity.