Walking In and Out of Place: the Pedestrian Performances of Tim Robinson

Abstract

Walking is a passing over time: the body present in each step’s fall into lack, catching itself on the ground, already future-bound, moving forward with the next step while inscribing the past in the last footprint. For 40 years the English expatriate Tim Robinson (born 1935) has walked the rural coastlines of Western Ireland (the Aran Islands, Connemara and the Burren) producing a substantial body of books, essays and hand-drawn maps that detail his own body’s fleeting engagement with the natural and cultural landscape of these desolate regions. Bringing the historical events of a place into present discourse, Robinson’s mediations and meditations on and of the land disrupt an economy of stable coordinated places to propose other ways of knowing and doing. This chapter is an exploration of how we might think of the rural walker as a performer and how his or her practice traverses the outsides of monolithic meaning inherent in the standardized map.