Community

Community Involvement

Providing a creative response that benefited many residents across such a vast geographical area was always going to be a challenge. The idea of taking a path or a walk as a starting point was received with great enthusiasm, with notions of routes and creative markers along the way to connect and bring people together.

A starting point was to literally take the local authority’s strapline for a walk in sections – From Mountain to Sea – starting from Ben MacDui in the Cairngorms.

Along the way a diverse range of more than 200 residents from different walks of life generously shared their personal stories with the Lead Artist. These included retired oil workers, ski athletes, farmers and artists, rig workers, prison inmates, residents and staff at care homes, knitting groups, operators of food banks, heritage, library and Rotary groups, schools and Syrian New Scots. As the project progressed new participants came on board.

For some, the pandemic brought a break from the speed of life that they were used to, walking around the places they lived and rediscovering the enjoyment of the outdoors. For others, isolation and detachment was something they were still struggling with.

The Lead Artist walked the route many times moving around from place to place to ensure the final pathway had the best access, views, points of interest. A new route, a spine though Aberdeenshire, was finally created.

Embroidery workshops were arranged for people that could not join the walks, they stitched their own favourite path or a path they would love to walk if they only could.

In summer ’24 the lead artist undertook an ambitious long-distance walk took place over 14 consecutive days to mark the installation of the family of benches along the new pathway which ended in the coastal town of Peterhead.

Lead Artist

Claudia Zeiske is a producer, cultural activist and walking curator whose interest lies in path-making as a cultural practice through socially engaged art. With friendship at heart, her walks combine a desire for a slower pace of life with socio-politically and environmentally sensitive issues. For more than a decade, her walking art projects have varied from short to long, in her vicinity or further afield, connecting places, communities and people along the way. Her walking prose promotes thinking aloud.

Projects include: SlowCoast 500 (2023), a 700 mile long walk along the entire North Sea coast of Scotland; Walking Lunches (2010-ongoing) a play on corporate working lunches; Home to Home (2017), a Brexit-stimulated 1,800-mile walk from the artist’s home in Huntly, Aberdeenshire to her childhood home in Bavaria, Germany; Slow Marathons (2012-ongoing), annual themed group walks, questioning the competitive nature of marathons; and From Mountain to Sea (2022), a 150-mile walk across Aberdeenshire to mark the Covid period.

Website: www.claudiazeiske.com

Instagram: @claudiazeiske

Bench Locations

Download the map of the walking route (PDF)