I am a live and visual artist, renting a curious studio at Stephens House & Gardens on East End Road in Finchley, doubling as The Kiosk Gallery, where I am currently showing an installation titled Discharging Materials. 

I present sculptural and performance artworks created out of hay, flour and water. We opened in November 2021 with a live performance exploring notions of belonging and the ageing female body. 

During lockdown, I found refuge in work and I dived even deeper into the physical and mental processes contained within my creative practice. One strategy I use to maintain creativity is walking. I find the steady rhythm of putting one foot down on the ground, closely followed by the other, helps to develop a momentum for thinking and moves me away from the making with hands, towards making with the mind. US Guardian writer Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking that “the act of remembering is imagined as a real act…a physical act: as walking…”. In other words, walking helps us to process our thoughts and feelings. 

I had always been accustomed to empty streets but during the lockdown, the terrain filled up, and some days walking felt like a scene from the film The Truman Show. I was able to observe families and couples conduct their relationships on the move. 

As that first lockdown ended in 2020, I remember feeling determined to challenge the zombie-like existence that had hemmed us all in for months. I had become aware that the isolation had made me lonely and the work was not growing in the way that I hoped for. What I needed was to engage and physically connect 

In the essays Of Word and Flesh, the Bulgarian French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, argues that “only an experience can save us”. After my confinement in lockdown, the only way to save myself from loneliness would be through creating an experience with other artists. 

And so, in August 2020, I partnered with Stephens House & Gardens to curate and develop a sculpture trail for their historic landscaped gardens. I invited ten local North London female artists to respond to the transitory times of the pandemic by submitting an ephemeral sculptural artwork to appear within the gardens, accessible to the public using a map. 

Briefly in Transit encouraged a walking public to access the arts whilst remaining on the move. The trail was subsequently funded by the Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant and Avenue House Estate Trust and in 2021 became part of an online collection for walking research at the University of Glasgow, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 

After the sculpture trail had gone up, I took a last-minute walk around the gardens before officially opening them to the public and thought about how we will make sense of this strange time. For me, walking will always help me to think and I hope that in my art I can facilitate this same sense that, in transit, we can move towards understanding. 

Rebekah Dean teaches Art for Wellbeing at Stephens House & Gardens.

For more information, find Rebekah on Instagram @rebekahdean.1, on WordPress or visit Stephens House and Gardens at 17 E End Rd, London, N3 3QE.