“Walking in my sisters’ footsteps”: DAD Send off
The Walk, the inspiration of Audrey Green Oakes, was part of the curated Folkestone Fringe 2014 programme of the Folkestone Triennial. It is a durational, participative project inspired by East Kent Suffragists who walked Kent’s Pilgrim’s Way, campaigning for the right to vote. The project combines walking, talking and connecting with an ancient landscape while carrying the weight of history and looking to an uncertain future. Where have we been, where are we now and where are we going?
To send the walkers taking part in “Walking in my sisters’ footsteps” on their way, Clare and Joanna performed a Send Off from Shakespeare beach, at the end of which is Shakespeare Cliff, so named because it is the cliff that Edmund descibes to his step father, the blind Earl of Gloucester, in the play King Lear.
The performance linked the domestic and political tragedy that unfolds in the play to the angel of domestic repression killed by Virginia Woolf’s ink pot – which led her to question “what is woman?” (without that ink pot) – and then to the battlefield angels of Mons in Patricia McCarthy’s poem, Virginia Woolf’s Angels 1919.
The walkers set off for Folkestone with a sustenance for both body and mind in the form of a DAD-stamped paper bag containing a Pink Lady apple, water from a volcanic source and a quote from McCarthy’s poem.
Sat 6 Sep | Dover to Folkestone
10.00 SEND OFF by Dover Arts Development at Shakespeare Beach, Dover CT17 9EQ. Walking: difficult
14.00 STOP OFF at Artist Helen Lindon’s studio 23 Wear Bay Road, Folkestone. Refreshments & chance to join The Walk.
15.00 WALK OFF from Wear Bay Road to Folkestone Harbour. Walking: easy
16.00 FINISH OFF beside True Briton, Harbour St CT20 1QN with with spoken word performance by poets, Fabulous Females
Sun 7 Sep | Summerhouse Hill to Postling 10.00 meet at Summerhouse Hill OSGB36 10.30 – 12.30 Walk to the village of Postling
What do women talk about when they walk in their sisters’ footsteps?
“Women on the road, coming out of every town and village”
In 1913 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies marched to London to highlight the work of “peaceful, law-abiding Suffragists”. A year later WW1 was declared, the societies suspended and it wasn’t until 1928 all women gained the vote. The marchers intention wasn’t for everyone to walk the whole route – some did, other joined for short periods – and in this fashion artists associated with Folkestone Fringe have already walked parts of the route between Stowting and Wye and Dover and Capel-le-Ferne.
