By Kristin Martin
(Kristin wrote the following essay on my work for a published catalogue from Principia College, which accompanied my recent exhibit. She has graciously given me permission to republish it here:
Art is not a thing—it is a way.¹
The Old English word ‘wealcan’ (which gave us the familiar verb ‘to walk’) did not originally mean striding in a direction with some intention from one place to another. This early Anglo-Saxon sense of walking comes from the rolling of waves and the pounding of wool cloth (to clean it and hook the fibers together, making a fabric that is warmer and more impervious to the elements). It also relates to the meditative action of rolling things around in one’s mind.²
Crossing the Threshold
Perhaps the Moon was watching Matthew Whitney as he awoke and strode towards his Seattle studio just after 4:30 a.m. sometime in late 2018. The temperature probably hovered in the mid-forties Fahrenheit and it would still be dark for another three hours.
One historic name for the full moon that falls in November is the Travel Moon³—a fitting sign to illuminate the exploration of Matthew Whitney’s walking and drawing practice. Let’s imagine it heard the hollow curl of the artist unrolling a piece of heavy drawing paper, the hiss of smoothing it against the floorboards, and the soft thunking of him walking back and forth across its surface.
If you were the Travel Moon, you would have seen him periodically emerge from the light of his studio to take a few steps in the wet grass before turning back and intentionally tracking the patterns of his boots onto the paper.
When enough individual boot prints had been layered on top of each other to make a scrabbly track lengthwise through the center of the paper, Whitney “spent the next month drawing with soft graphite in the areas around the tread – paying attention and being careful to not draw ‘outside the lines’ of the scuffs and dirt marks” until he had created a work that vaguely resembles a map⁴. Or a breaking wave.
Whitney’s December 2018 blog entry about the making of this piece (a work he first titled Here, Illuminated, but now appears in this exhibition as Bridge)⁵ showed up in my social media feed because we had overlapped during our graduate studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts six years earlier.
What initially caught me about this drawing was the layering of two ancient ways of human exploration—walking with the feet and markmaking with bits of rock held in the fingers. I like to use his process as an opening project in my Drawing I classes because it strikes me as a useful way to subvert the claim that a person can’t draw. (Once, it even worked out for Whitney to send video feedback to the students about their efforts, for which I was very grateful.)
There is one conceptual quality of Bridge (hinted at in the artist’s title change) that I was never able to replicate with my students, however. It is his practice of throwing open the double doors of experience and repeatedly crossing the threshold between doing and making. The drawing on the wall only tells half the story; other than the artist’s blog entry, there is no record of Whitney walking out, over and over again, into the dewy darkness that morning, nor of any pauses that might have happened before returning to the light of his studio. So how does an artist make both states visible?
A Rolling ‘Transubstantiation’
Consisting of 10 large works on paper attached to the wall with beefy binder clips, looped video projections, and an installation of approximately 7500 crumpled sheets of copier paper covering the gallery floor, Seeking That Shimmering Weave (Experiments and Encounters through Drawing) puts process and product back in proximity. In doing so, Whitney takes Baudelaire’s flâneur (or flâneuse, as the case may be) on a pilgrimage of participation. Rather than observing at a distance, his work invokes a kind of rolling ‘transubstantiation’: paper as body; body as pencil; pencil as path; path as communion; communion as paper.
I Walked a Mile For You, 2024, watercolor on paper, 36” x 200”
Paper as Body
In That Which Is (2017), Whitney explores “the flawed body, and work[s] within the creases, indeed making them a vital part of the composition” by first crumpling a 60” x 84” sheet of drawing paper into a ball, (imperfectly) smoothing it out again, and then penciling in the shapes created between the creases.⁶ You can see him perform his crumpling and smoothing process in the crumpled paper–concept (2026) video. The paper begins to register more as a body the more it is crumpled, embraced, and smoothed, particularly when the artist pauses after enfolding it in his arms. Is it becoming more flawed …or more alive? Whitney sanctifies this exploration with the addition of warm gold acrylic in Working It Out (2018) and Incarnated (c.2017).
Body as Pencil; Pencil as Path
In 2005, UK-based GPS artist Jeremy Wood⁷ spent three months creating a work called Meridians, in which he spelled out “It is not down in any map; true places never are,”—a sentence written by Herman Melville in his 1851 novel Moby-Dick—by walking a line that turned out to be over 44 miles long on the Greenwich Peninsula in London, while carrying a GPS tracker.⁸
Following in Wood’s footsteps (so to speak), Whitney did not have to carry an extra device, because GPS tracking apps are now built into the smartphones that most of us wear everywhere as extensions of ourselves. Whitney’s work does not stop with the digital rendering of the GPS data, though. To create works such as Clairvoyance (2013) or Movement in Kind (2015), he first takes himself on a walk to make the line, and then (in the spirit of Paul Klee) takes a line for a walk to make the drawing.
Path as Communion
In a departure from his other renderings of GPS drawings, Whitney illustrates a section of the Seattle map in Glass Half (2015) with wine-red pencil. His walking path outlines two vessels—a water glass on the left and a wine goblet on the right. Each includes a line through the center representing the liquid level. For scale, the distance from the goblet’s foot, which sits on the north edge of Woodland Park, to its rim at NW 85th Street is 1.3 miles (2.092 km). Given other biblical references in Whitney’s work and writings, the shapes in this path could call to mind the “cup of cold water” in Matthew 10:42 (KJV) and the sacramental wine of Mark 14:23. Instead of taking communion in a church where congregants can perceive the ritual, though, what does it mean to walk those shapes (if that is what they signify) on such a large scale that they become invisible to the public encompassed in them?
Whereas Glass Half could be seen to expand a ritual of communion beyond recognition, I Walked a Mile For You(2024) condenses a devotional walk down to a relic of that experience. For whomever (or whatever) the You is in the title, Whitney brought a 200” long sheet of drawing paper into a pine forest at the Grunewald Guild,⁹ “put some watercolor in a vat, and walked back and forth across the paper for roughly a mile.”¹⁰ All the marks were made with his bare feet. If you look closely, you can see the impressions of the pine needles carpeting the forest floor where he laid down the paper.
Communion as Paper
Aside from the religious ritual of bread and wine, communion can also mean “the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings,” a “relationship of recognition and acceptance,”¹¹ and “the act of sharing something or holding it in common, or the state of something so held.”¹² One can see Whitney using these ideas as materials to crumple, (re)mark upon, or hold—the same ways he treats his paper.
For example, in the video performance piece Eat This Scroll (for breakfast) (2026), the barefoot artist, in black t-shirt and pants, performs a kind of ceremony: “written words are crumpled, tossed toward a pail, burned to ash, mixed with water, eaten, and then used as a drawing medium. The meaning and medium are filtered and consumed, back into the means of mark-making.”¹³ The title of the piece is a reference to Ezekiel 3:1, where God instructs Ezekiel to eat a scroll covered in “words of lament and mourning and woe” (Ezekiel 2:9, NIV) and then communicate His words to the people of Israel. (Christ would later say: Take, eat; this is my body.) Here, because Whitney does not digest the scroll, the communion (the recognition and acceptance) comes back to the paper.
Finally, the crumpled paper rolling around the gallery floor that began as a communal activity (Principia College faculty and students participated in the crumpling), smooths out into an installation when the gallery is empty, and will reactivate into a shared experience whenever people enter the gallery. “…You, the viewer, can interact with them. Pick them up. Read them if something is written. Toss them at each other (playfully!). Or shovel a path through them — which is what I seek to do in my life. Seeking.”¹⁴
And so…
In these times, walking for any duration through an American city or town as someone who both belongs to the place and brings their own metacognitive gaze is no small thing. Is it an act of privilege? Of necessity? Of curiosity (which, etymologically, carries with it the expression of care)?¹⁵ Of devotion? Of responsibility? In some parts of the country, the costs of walking and watching are becoming unusually high.¹⁶
As I wake to finish writing this essay (and feed my baby) sometime just after 4:30 in the morning on February 2, 2026, perhaps the Snow Moon is patiently waiting for nearly two dozen Buddhist monks to rise, gather their saffron robes about themselves, and set out from Kingsland Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia to continue their 2,300-mile Walk for Peace.¹⁷ They will mark the 100th day of their pilgrimage from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, D.C. by inviting people to walk with them from Fire Station to City Hall. People will bow to the monks and give them flowers. The monks will give the flowers to children farther down their path.
Heat or no heat. Snow or no snow. Being that shimmering weave.
—Kristin Martin is an assistant professor of Visual Arts at Principia College. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Notes
- Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys: To the Homes of Great Teachers (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1916).
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “walk,” Accessed January 29, 2026, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/walk_v?tab=etymology&tl=true.
- Royal Museums Greenwich, “Why do we have special names for full moons?” Accessed January 29, 2026, https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/space-astronomy/what-are-names-full-moons-throughout-year
- Matthew Whitney, “Here, Illuminated (Bridge),” Matthew Whitney: art, life, and wanderings, December 27, 2018, https://www.matthewwhitney.com/here-illuminated/
- ibid.
- Matthew Whitney, “that which is,” Matthew Whitney: art, life, and wanderings, December 23, 2018, https://www.matthewwhitney.com/that-which-is/
- Elaine Sexton, “The Sensation of Being Lost: A Micro-Interview with Jeremy Wood,” Tupelo Quarterly, June 8, 2015, https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/visual-art/jeremy-wood/
- Jeremy Wood, “Can’t Be Elsewhere When GPS Drawing.” GPS Drawing, accessed on January 30, 2026.
- “The Grünewald Guild is a nonprofit arts education retreat center nestled in the heart of Cascadian woodland, on 16 peaceful acres by the Wenatchee River in Plain Valley, Washington.” Its mission is to “welcome and inspire all who seek to explore the relationships between art, faith & community.” https://www.grunewaldguild.com/purpose
- Matthew Whitney, “i walked a mile for you,” Matthew Whitney: art, life, and wanderings, May 19, 2025, https://www.matthewwhitney.com/i-walked-a-mile-for-you/
- Oxford Languages, s.v. “communion.” Accessed on January 31, 2026, https://www.google.com/search?q=define+communion
- Dictionary.com, s.v. “communion.” Accessed January 31, 2026, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/communion
- Matthew Whitney, “Eat This Scroll (for breakfast),” Matthew Whitney: art, life, and wanderings, January 4, 2025, https://www.matthewwhitney.com/eat-this-scroll-for-breakfast/
- “…A mass spectacle, inspired perhaps by the millions of porcelain sunflower seeds of Ai Weiwei made by his army of craftspeople, or the pile of candy representing the dying partner of Félix González-Torres…” Matthew Whitney thus situated his crumpled paper installation in an unpublished statement shared with me via Instagram on November 26, 2025.
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “curiosity,” Accessed January 31, 2026, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/curiosity_n?tab=meaning_and_use#7543278
- While walking in public with a sense of agency is becoming newly complicated for certain groups of American residents in parts of the United States, it is worth recognizing that many of our African-American neighbors have been living in “these times” for the last 400 years.
- The Vietnamese Theravada Buddhist monks started their journey in Fort Worth, Texas on October 26, 2025. Walking in silence each day, they aim to reach Washington, D.C. in mid-February (coincidentally, pretty close to the opening of this exhibition). See Walk For Peace Facebook account.