/between my parents - a five day walk/
In this suite of photographs, Alastair Levy adopts what may be termed the conventions of conceptual and performance art exemplified by such artists as Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. The photograph in effect becomes a document of an event or a performance and it is this performance that is the artwork In the case of Long however, the performance (ie. the walk) may seem to be impersonal and sometimes banal. Conceptual art since the sixties has generally been careful to avoid the personal and certainly to avoid the emotional.Levy tells us that after his parents separated when he was eleven years old, he made the journey from his father's house in London to his mother's in Canterbury - a distance of some 80 miles - each fortnight for seven years. His parent's separation would have been a traumatic event for Levy and even at a young age he must have pondered that this was a separation not just of a partnership of two people, but a physical separation that involved him being placed in a state of displaced limbo.
As an adult it has increasingly seemed to Levy that the hour and a half train journey has symbolised his parent's separation; the geographical distance representing the emotional gulf between them. The process of /between my parents - a five day walk/ aactually covering the distance is the work here. In the event Levy decided to walk the 80 miles over 5 days making photographs on the route. Partly this operates as a kind of evidence that the walk has taken place - a document of the walk - but we also begin to see symbols and me- taphors within apparently ordinary photographs. Individually, these do not seem to be sophisticated images in their construction, but their very ordinariness, cumulatively, is eloquent here. By walking the 80 miles instead of taking the train, Levy amplifies the experience of the journey. The walk seems to take on the mantle of a penance for some vaguely perceived misdemeanour - some sort of transference of guilt perhaps. Some time after making the walk Levy discovered that the route he had taken was the old 'Pilgrim's Way', taken by Christians going from Winchester to Canterbury. This revelation underlined the significance and meaning of his journey in a neat symmetry.
This is a very beautiful body of work, rich in allusion and metaphor, and like all good art it expands in meaning the more it is contemplated.