Desire path

Welcome to Desire Lines, a podcast exploring the intersections between creative practice and geography.

The themes explored in this podcast are wide-ranging, including environment, walking, the body, well-being, health, diversity, belonging and much, much more.

Desire Lines is hosted by me, Emily Wilkinson.

I am a researcher, artist, writer, coach and movement teacher based in Wales, UK.

You can find references, links and further information in the show notes.

But when you when someone asks you to do something that's three meters big, or, you know, a fine piece of work, but it will go over a 17 meters or something you know you you really get to explore those threads you know threads that have been made for centuries in a similar way in in a yeah and really see what they can do so yeah I've always loved loved that yeah

And just to pop a visual in there of how these earlier were, you can imagine these large embroidery pieces, not always large, sometimes smaller, but stitched, finely stitched gold lines, kind of weaving their ways in different shapes and patterns.

And I have one in my house, which is this beautiful big gold sphere on a dark background and the lines just kind of meshed into weave, which obviously links to... me for desire lines which we're going to get on later but before we get metaphorical because that could go that could go places far away places let's talk about the bridge into working with straw then so you start out working with these gold metal threads which are actually on the endangered craft list right endangered heritage craft lists because like endangered species we also have endangered crafts

There was this, you know when there'll be a park and it will have these paths across the park and then it will snow and then people will make their own paths.

They'll make these, what they're called desire paths.

And the desire paths will be much more organic and they will connect places much more naturally to where people actually use it.

And I do think that when we were all home for the pandemic and a lot of people, especially people that write on keyboards for a living and you do email for a living, they were all sitting in their house.

A lot of people were working, but these are the people that make conversation and they were not.

Absent the kind of touch point of normal life, both reactions from people, but also just experiencing society the way we used to, people made these desire paths of what they thought the world should look like.

And it just, and then the snow melts, right? And

so- I mean, the problem with those desire paths is there are people that didn't just make the paths, they enforced that path.