Shadow-walks is an ongoing project, which involves three main elements: walking with others, listening to environmental sound, and improvised singing. It grew out of an interest in our sense of place and our relationship with places, especially very familiar ones. When we walk through a particular area frequently, I wonder how that affects our psyche, and how we affect the place. James Joyce wrote that places remember events, and I like the idea of walking through layers of the small everyday events of people’s personal history and memories.

Kingston is the fifteenth place where Shadow-walks have occurred. I ask local residents to take me on their “special” walks, those that have been repeated many times and have meaning for them. As we walk I record our conversations and the environmental sounds. Later I walk the route solo, singing the traces of that person’s walk, my voice in a sense becoming the ghost of these memories and associations. The recordings are edited together to become the final work, the Shadow-walk. The listener then takes an interiorized walk through the layers of memory, place and time in Kingston.