The Taken Path is a video and soundscape installation that was seeded during A Partnership for Uncertain Times , a project developed by Dr Deidre Feeney, University of South Australia, and the Australian Network of Art and Technology and Arts South Australia in 2023. It was then expanded for the 2025 Adelaide Festival and screened in The Wall Gallery at Carrick Hill, Adelaide. See this film for background information.
See the trailer here
Summary
The Taken Path is a speculative, durational project that hangs of a poetic idea; what would I notice if I walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and filmed the journey?
There seems to be an innate drive in us to intervene in, alter and reorder the natural environments around us, even if we have no place in them.
During 2024/25 Catherine Truman worked in collaboration with Ian Gibbins to develop the project. Using an iPhone and a video camera, a defined path that traverses natural and altered landscapes at Carrick Hill was filmed at monthly intervals over a year to bring focus to these constantly shifting interrelationships.
Carrick Hill estate nestled in the foothills of Adelaide is a vast conundrum of these delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. It is a vast estate where pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life can be encountered at once. It is like a microcosm of the wider world.
The concept is simple, yet this embodied action, repeated over time reveals profound shifts of climate and impacts of human industry. The project has opened new approaches to embodied observation and speculates that the seasons aren’t so orderly anymore; that there is a great deal of blindness and uncertainty shaping our relationship to the natural world
Artist Statement
It has been an immense challenge and a pleasure to create The Taken Path.
Together we’ve learnt a great deal about vision during this project, all the while focusing on a compelling set of rules that set our gaze front and centre.
Our awareness of the periphery has taught us surprising lessons.
For it is, in fact, what lay outside the plan, the places where the questions continue to pull and tug, that holds the most fertile ground; the fleeting, darting, unfocused blurs, much of which goes by unnoticed, living and dying in vivid cycles, interwoven in a parallel universe.
We are not at the centre of everything in existence. We are not the reason nor the solution, but we are here at the same time. We do not exist in isolation.
We are colour-blind at the edges until we change direction.
Catherine Truman in collaboration with Ian Gibbins
January 2025
Background: excerpt from artist talk, Carrick Hill, March, 2025
As an artist in residence, I have worked my way through many related medical and biomedical environments at Flinders University, where Ian and I first met, including anatomy, histology and neuroscience, always gripped by the subject of what makes up a human, quite literally- in terms of the complex structures of the body, and also how we all learn and develop knowledge differently.
During 2019 and into 2020, after a time in the microscopy suite I was particularly interested in human vision and pursued a creative residency in the ophthalmology imaging unit at Flinders Eye and Vision clinic. Here I discovered an amazing correspondence between the anatomy and physiology of the human eye and the structures of plants - particularly the branching neural and vascular networks and the photoreceptive cells found in the retina. And so, to learn more, I undertook parallel residency at the South Australian Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium. This creative research culminated in a body of objects and series of experimental films presented in an exhibition called Shared Reckonings at the Museum of Economic Botany.
At this time, COVID was having a huge impact across the world. The exhibition made it through, but the impact meant, for many, a time of isolation and introspection. Ironically, I felt it was a time to think more globally, in particular about our relationship with the natural world; about human impact, about survival and sustainability and then to take it in much more personally- and think about my role in all of that… what impact did I have and what role could I play in the future as an artist?
Two pivotal invitations followed one after the other, the first to be artist in residence here at Carrick hill and to create and present a body of work in response to the relationship between the house and the surrounding landscape. The second came from Dr Deirdre Feeney and the Australian Network of Art and Technology to participate in their project A Partnership for Uncertain Times…a year-long project that “focused on creative research with an emphasis on courageous experimental development rather that polished outcomes.
And so, in 2022 I immersed fully into the fabric of Carrick Hill that presented a conundrum of delicate balances between humans and the greater environment, particularly our drive to alter and intervene in the natural landscapes around us.
Firstly, I made a body of objects in response to the residency and presented an exhibition titled The Arrangements: assembling nature within the house museum for the 2023 Adelaide Festival.
It was a fulfilling experience, that provided a foundation for The Taken Path.
I decided to film a set path that traversed many different landscapes at Carrick Hill, once a month for a period of a year.
I chose a path that bisects the estate, with the house at the centre. One-half of the path extends out East from the front door and goes across the teardrop garden, up the stone stairs and continues up between a cathedral of ordered pines and gums ending at a magnificent old, old Grey Box eucalypt on the rim of endangered remnant Grassy woodland. And the other half of the path stretches from the back of the house down through the pair of elms, down through the ribcage of the pleached pear arbour, beyond the hedge and out between the rows of tall cypress pines and culminates at a singular pencil pine, contained in a curious iron-rod pyramid-cage on the Western urban boundary of the estate.
So many layers to pass through; of landscapes; of history and through all kinds of weather.
Early on I decided to invite Ian Gibbins to collaborate. I knew he would bring in both scientific and creative perspectives to open out the project.
Ian Gibbins, collaborator
Ian is a video poet and an emeritus professor of anatomy and a former neuroscientist and he and I share an avid interest in the intersections of art and science. In fact, we have been collaborating since 2006 and generated many projects together. We both find working across disciplines very fruitful.
The Project
As a catalyst I asked one simple poetic question: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and filmed the journey?
Almost too simple for us complex beings. It was extraordinarily challenging at the start – it felt like a free-fall in a sense; a challenge to simply be observers and not to bow down to expectations.
So, we evolved a simple set of rules that guided the footage that recorded our monthly walks. I chose to use my iPhone and Ian a professional video camera. They were to be held at chest height always facing forward to film the path in front of us, accepting whatever the conditions were on the way. We would choose a random day and time, usually when Carrick Hill was closed to the public.
Each month, we’d arrive on site and go our separate ways each filming the entire path towards and away from the house on both sides. These were to be our core films . Each month, once the core films were done, we’d gather together to compare notes and then each follow whatever took our interest, usually things we’d sensed on the periphery.
For the final exhibition we included six video screens and four channel soundscape. Two screens, side by side, presented both artists’ footage of the walk in real time lasting over four hours, and an additional four screens explored the different peripheral aspects in a series of inter-related shorter videos.
The Taken Path will be re-calibrated and presented at Reciprocity, for ANAT SPECTRA, University of the Sunshine Coast in October, 2025