Walking Poets: Wordsworth and Basho

Extracts from Wordsworth's 'Prelude' are mapped onto a three-dimensional interactive map of the landscape of Grasmere and the surrounding area. The interactive screen version of the map allows viewers to explore the text-landscape and to view it from different angles and perspectives, whilst the digital prints are pauses, quiet hiatuses allowing us a more contemplative viewing experience. In re-presenting the contours of the landscape Wordsworth wrote about, the work returns the poet's words literally and metaphorically to the topography that was so much a part of Wordsworth's life and work. In turn, Richardson allows us to explore the contours of this landscape through touch-screen. We are able to track our own path through the topographical lines of the map, whilst simultaneously following the poetic lines of Wordsworth's most famous literary masterpiece. In so doing, our fingers take us for a walk both literally and imaginatively. As such offers a contemporary response to Wordsworth's poetry of place in the context of our digitally connected, screen-based world. Wordsworth's words are digitally scattered on the earth, their legibility actively reformed through each user's hands