Placeways

Clips from an interview with Ursula Ledwith, The Arts Programme, RosFm. Full interview available here.

PLACEWAYS formed part of Anna’s Creative Places Ballaghaderreen Artist Research Residency - 2023 - 2024. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Roscommon County Council.

Anna’s year-long residency was rooted in community engagement, walking practice and shared reflection.

Over the course of the programme, Anna worked with participants across the town to explore how places are known, imagined, inhabited, sensed and remembered. The project considered how attachment forms and how meaning gathers around everyday environments.

PLACEWAYS unfolded through a series of interconnected strands: contemplative walks, a heritage exhibition, podcast conversations, public workshops, and a school collaboration exploring the story of Anne Deane.

Mapping past, present and future relationships with place

PLACEWAYS developed as a way of understanding landscape not simply as geography, but as lived experience.

During the residency, the term came to describe more than movement along physical routes. It expanded to include the sensory, emotional, cultural and imaginative ways people come into relationship with their surroundings.

Contemplative Walks

Memory, story, gesture, atmosphere and encounter became as important as direction or destination.

Beginning from different edges of Ballaghaderreen, participants walked towards sites of historic and communal significance, tracing paths shaped by river, road, boundary and story. Some journeys followed outward lines towards heritage locations; others prompted a gradual turning inward.

In each case, the emphasis rested on attention rather than arrival.

As people moved through streets and margins, they exchanged recollections, noticed overlooked details and allowed familiar environments to disclose unexpected depth.

Attention shifted from travelling across space to being present within it.

Pauses were vital.

Moments of stillness allowed surfaces to soften and subtle layers to emerge. What appeared ordinary at first often revealed itself as complex, storied and alive with association.

Through this process, PLACEWAYS became both method and metaphor: a collective practice of perceiving together.

Mapping Without a Map

While early ideas considered producing a physical cartographic artwork, the residency revealed that the most meaningful mapping was already happening through participation itself.

Each walk left traces through blog diaries, photographs and recorded reflections, creating a living record of encounter. These archives built momentum for the project, prompting continued engagement through conversation and return visits, rather than settling into a single fixed surface.

PLACEWAYS therefore came to understand mapping as something dynamic: renewed each time a route was walked, retold or remembered.

Photo: Ref: Ballaghaderreen Community Garden Facebook

Context

Across cultures and throughout history, communities have created ways of travelling that are also ways of knowing. From song traditions that carry memory through terrain to systems of alignment that situate human life within wider patterns, movement has long been intertwined with meaning.

PLACEWAYS grew from this recognition. It asked how contemporary communities might rediscover forms of attentiveness that connect people to landscape through care, imagination and shared presence.

Legacy

The insights, relationships and working methods that emerged during PLACEWAYS now underpin Anna’s wider practice and directly informed the evolution of LifeWays.

Photo from Ballagh Community Garden Facebook

For more info on Creative Places Ballaghaderreen click HERE