In When I Walk, Jessica Auer transforms Swan Park into a slow, choreographed journey — a walk that becomes an artwork in itself. Her installation takes shape as a sequence of large‑scale photographic panels placed along a deliberate path through the park. As visitors follow this route, they cross a series of visual and conceptual thresholds: moving from the familiar landscape around them into images of distant coastlines, remote ruins, and terrains shaped by histories far beyond Inishowen.
Each photograph acts like a doorway — opening onto places marked by migration, colonial encounters, surveillance architectures, and the quiet persistence of ruins. The images are accompanied by short fragments of text that invite visitors to reflect on walking as a form of attention: the rhythm of steps, the movement of breath, and the sensation of time stretching between geological pasts and imagined futures.
Auer’s work emerges directly from her time in Swan Park, from conversations with the curator, and from her long‑standing research into walking as a way of knowing. Walking becomes a threshold between body and landscape, between perception and memory, between where we stand and the wider world we belong to. Her practice also draws resonance from northern sites — Canada, Ireland, Iceland — where coastlines operate as boundaries, markers of conflict, and symbols of possibility.
In this way, When I Walk brings the visitor into a state of slow noticing. It turns Swan Park into an unfolding narrative, where each step carries the visitor across subtle borders: between here and elsewhere, past and present, local and global. The work asks us to consider how landscapes hold stories of power, progress, and displacement — and how walking can open a threshold through which those stories become felt rather than simply observed.
As part of the broader exhibition, Auer’s installation invites visitors to inhabit the threshold physically — to move through it with intention, and to recognise walking as both an intimate practice and a way of crossing into new ways of seeing
