Conceptual Land Artist Chester Hubble writes about his travel experiences away from his highly sought after Walk Pieces. Collectors, worry not, he will return to them in the Spring.
First Trip
I have always distrusted vehicles. They compress the world until it fits a timetable. Walking, by contrast, stretches minutes into material, something you can smear, scrape back, leave to dry. My art practice began as a refusal to arrive too quickly. This journal is a side-effect of that refusal.
My first journey, then, was not ambitious in distance, only in attitude. I went to The Isle of Dogs Foot Tunnel, and decided not to emerge on the other side.
Most people treat the tunnel as a throat: a necessary swallowing between Greenwich and the financial district. I treated it as a room. I entered just after dawn, when the Thames was still deciding what colour to be that day. The spiral stairwell delivered me downward like a screw being gently over-tightened. By the time I reached the tiled corridor, my ears had popped into a more attentive mode.
The tunnel is white, but not one white, more a committee of whites arguing quietly. There is hospital white, nicotine white, the pearly white of glazed tiles that have watched too much water pass above them. I began walking very slowly, slower than politeness allows. This is how I usually start: by irritating the commuters.
My rule for the journey was simple: I would turn back every time I noticed myself thinking of the exit. This meant I spent a long time in the middle, a no-man’s-land where footsteps echo before they belong to anyone. I sketched with my eyes. Cracks became coastlines. Drips were metronomes. A man in a hi-vis jacket passed me three times, each time looking more concerned, as if I were a stain that refused to be cleaned.
Halfway through, I sat down.
This is where the journey became unusual, even by my standards. Sitting transforms infrastructure into architecture. The tunnel widened perceptually. I noticed the curve wasn’t symmetrical; it leaned, like a tired pensioner. I pressed my palm to the tiles and felt the river overhead, not directly, but translated, like Braille for nature.
I ate an apple. The sound of it was obscene in that echo. I kept the core and later used it to mark distances on the floor, sliding it ahead of me and walking to it, again and again. This is an old studio trick of mine: outsourcing intention to an object that doesn’t care.
Time pooled. The tunnel developed moods. Around midday, it became theatrical. Footsteps announced themselves in advance. Voices arrived before bodies. By afternoon, it was domestic, forgiving. Someone had left a single glove on a ledge; I resisted the urge to curate it.
When I finally surfaced, back where I had entered, it felt less like returning and more like being misprinted. The sky seemed provisional. I wrote in my notebook: I did not cross anything today. I stayed with it.
This, I think, is how the journeys will go. Not elsewhere, exactly. Just deeper into places that already think they are finished.
