Noel Meek

Walking Scores

• 
  
• with Elliot Vaughan
  
• 
  
• Performance Work
  
• Performance Arcade
  
• Wellington
• February 2024
• 
  
• Photos: Camus Wyatt

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, walking has become a way for artists to explore relationships between body, sculpture, theory, and social relations in art. In particular, walking has been used as a way to escape institutional strictures in art, freeing practitioners from gallery architecture, weighty materials, and commercial restraints. 

To explore this, Noel Meek and Elliot Vaughan commissioned new walking performance scores by Aotearoa artists John Vea, Louie Zalk-Neale (Ngāi te Rangi), Rob Thorne (Ngāti Tumutumu), and Sonya Lacey. With performances every day of The Performance Arcade in February 2024, Meek and Vaughan explored a rich and challenging artistic ecology showing walking’s potential as an aesthetic, social and political action.