“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it… Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk or tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known.”

– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

In this Studio Session we will explore how the act of wandering creates rhythms, repetitions, and relations that form research pathways. The word ‘research’ comes from Old French ‘recercher’, "to seek out, search closely," and from Latin circare "to go about, wander, traverse, to wander hither and thither, to circle.” Through wandering, a multitude of relations and stories on this earthly clay crust emerge. We will consider meandering as making and question how we observe, collect, trace, and relate to the bodies and landscapes we inhabit. We will invite chance and follow with care as we, according to Pauline Oliveros, “walk like your feet are ears.”

Rosemary Holliday Hall is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and performance. Hall's evolving projects draw attention to connections between more-than-human agencies and cultural ecologies to explore human's relationships with nature and culture. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA with a minor in Environmental Horticulture from the University of California, Davis.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC. She is the recipient of multiple residencies, fellowships, and collaborative grants which include participation in the UC Davis Bilinski fellowship with PhD Candidate Tracie Hayes researching beetle scavengers, Ex.Change: Artist and Scientist on Climate Change grant and exhibition examining climate change in the Chicago region, Art, Science & Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant with PhD Predrag Popovic at the University of Chicago researching swarms and termites, Oxbow School of Art Fellowship, the Maria and Jan Manetti Shrem UC Davis Royal Drawing School Fellowship, and Vashon Artist in Residence.

This Studio Session took place in July 2023.