Just to get out of the house: a maternal lens on suburban walking as arts practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT From their curving crescents to their position on the outskirts, waiting, the suburbs have been conceptualised culturally by a maternal geographical metaphor. Unlike the revered space of Romantic maternalised landscapes, the suburbs have provided a different kind of background to the artist; their apparent monotony being one from which the subject longs to escape. Here, I evaluate the experience of swapping the heroic for the routine walk by bringing walking as an artistic practice to my own suburb. I consider what alternatives to the studied dismissal of these areas can reveal, and outline ways of knowing a space that come from encountering it repeatedly alongside a child, suggesting characteristics of suburban walking through which we may consider mothering as a cartographic tool. Performing an artistic identity in a zone intended for the maintenance of the domestic complicates unconscious boundaries between private and public space. I reflect on these spatialised performances of self as they were revealed in exhibiting a “deep map” based on these walks in the local museum. I use my own experiences to probe the definitions by which we understand the borders of our life spaces, and evaluate the potential for de-compartmentalising the geography of our art spaces, too.