Ben Lapierre

In the summer of 2024, I was invited by PopeCullen to participate in an artist residency at Gibraltar Point that focused on walking and art. I applied to the residency with the intention of thinking through walking’s centrality to my photographic research-creation process. Led by the connections between movement and photography, I wanted to consider how walking with my camera facilitated, intervened in, and shaped my getting to know a given place. In this way, my involvement in the artist residency was predicated on my academic work—an effort to uncover a hybridity between my artistic practice and research methods.

When I entered the studio at Gibraltar Point, I faced a large bank of windows that lit the entire space. Tabletops were lined with brown paper, the surfaces upon which organizers evidently expected me to work. Yet, the studio provoked a deep restlessness in me—I was unable to produce. I walked around the space, from table-to-table, couch-to-desk—pacing around and hoping for something to emerge.

These moments of paralysis in my studio provoked a fear that I had hit a wall. The residency came so soon after major milestones in my doctoral degree—qualifying examinations and countless thesis proposal drafts. Leaning away from the self-imposed necessity for my time at Gibraltar Point to feed my academic methods, I became further engaged in the group walks around Toronto Island. As I relaxed into the rhythm of the residency and formed meaningful bonds with the other artists, I felt distanced from the pressure to produce and began questioning this impulse.

Upon reflection, it became evident that walking was, and still is, central to my practice—whether it be in states of flow, production, and capture, or procrastination and paralysis. It was the pacing around my studio and pressure to produce work that inevitably formed this project. There is an underlying irony and self-reflexivity to this series, where the body of work was born out of the thing it aims to critique. Yet, in creating this series, I somehow got lost in the process—a return to the creativity I feared I lost. This project is fueled by the contentious relationship that creators and thinkers have to their work.

Through long exposure, these photographs map movement that is rooted in restlessness and avoidance—sustained moments of friction and tension. The relationship between artist and their work is captured by my walking to—and away from—workspaces in my studio. Self-portraiture plays a key role in this project as it’s deployed to explore themes of presence and authorship that artists so often wrestle with. In this series, self-portraiture is used think through the tension of presence and absence in one’s process and work. My ghost-like trails across the images articulate the paradox between movement and paralysis that were fundamental to my growth at Gibraltar Point.

Experimentation is central to this corpus. Locating film at a slow enough speed to trace my movement through such a bright space plays a key role in the success of the project—shooting numerous rolls at ISO 8. Not having immediate resources to develop the film on-site meant that I was unaware of what was being captured. Of over 700 35mm stills taken over several days, I now sit with roughly one-tenth of the work today.