Step, Step, Step: a mindful walking workshop by Liszu Tan
Footsteps hastily quicken in the jostling city filled with people zooming from point A to B. Side eye glares if we bump into someone. Maybe an accidental stumble occurs. This can be quite unforgiving if an elderly takes a tumble.
This workshop is about slowing down and connecting to our feet. Through a mindful walking exercise, we will place one foot in front of the other. As we step, we will bring attention to each footstep with care and gentle kindness. In our head we will observe and make note of every “step, step, step”. This is to quieten the mind and bring attention to the present.
There are over 200,000 microscopic sensory nerve endings in the pair. The workshop’s aim is to knead the numbness out of it.
By going barefoot, we will energise it with sensory play through tactile surfaces on the floor. To pay attention to the interruptions, criss cross patterns and lines of tape covering the floor. The foot will lead and be the guide. It will trace the lines of the tape and observe the textural differences. The stops, the gaps and the diagonals.
Once more, we will feel the walking rhythm in our feet.
Liszu Tan’s artwork crosses sculpture, performance and drawings. Often treating materials and objects like skin and bones. At times blending disappearing marks onto bodily surfaces. Extensions of her embodied Butoh gestures. She is fascinated by facets related to the body. From its inner workings to the moving body and the underlying politics that govern its presence in space. She utilises the vocabulary of abstraction and gestures to create assemblages of objects that allude to narratives about the body’s relationship to space, time and memories. Stretchy morphing soft sculptures, liminal wood structure with hinge curtains, bouncing bowling ball. Her sculptures can be inhabited, interacted with and respond architecturally. She is also anosmic and works with scent, texture and disappearing colour to engage with this missing sensory input.
Liszu is a Malaysian artist based between Kuala Lumpur and London. She has shown internationally in Somers Gallery in London, ATTA Gallery in Bangkok and with Supper House in Singapore. She was an artist-in-residence in the Visual Arts program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She holds a MA Sculpture from Royal College of Art and MA Fine Arts from Lasalle College of the Arts.