I met Barbara Lounder at the Walking’s New Movements conference in Plymouth, UK, in the fall of 2019. She and her husband, Robert Bean, were very kind; they even invited me for dinner with Hamish Fulton, the renowned walking artist. Barbara and I have kept in touch since then, and when she let me know she had published a chapbook as part of her Corona Walker exhibition at Hermes Gallery in Halifax, I immediately sent an e-transfer. The chapbook arrived two weeks ago, and since it’s so short (someday I want to publish a chapbook!), I moved it to the top of my TBR pile, which is actually multiple piles, heaps really: okay, a hoarding situation that requires outside help.
Anyhow, this chapbook is beautiful, which isn’t a surprise, since Barbara is a sculptor and installation artist, who also does walking performances and social practice work. She and Robert both taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for many years. My point is that books by artists tend to be beautiful, and I’m a sucker for beautiful objects. This is a work of art, and like a limited edition print, my copy is numbered: 7/100.
One of the exciting things about this chapbook is the inclusion of two tintypes! One is a photograph of a young girl in the nineteenth century; she represents Corona Walker, the subject of the exhibition for which this chapbook was produced. The other is an image of Barbara and Robert. Here they are:
My photograph is terrible–I freely admit it!–but at least I managed to keep my fingers, which were holding the book open, out of the frame.
The Corona Walker project has been in the works for nearly 35 years. In 1992, Barbara noticed a broken headstone in a cemetery in Dartmouth, where she and Robert live, that bore the name “Corona Walker,” who was born in 1870, just after Confederation, and died in 1889. She has left few historical records, aside from her headstone, which looks rather substantial in the photograph included in the chapbook, a death announcement in the Halifax Morning Herald, and a brief mention of her funeral in a contemporary’s journal. The marble headstone has been repaired, but the inscription underneath the young woman’s dates of birth and death has been obscured by time and weather and lichen.
During the Covid-19 novel coronavirus pandemic, when Nova Scotia was locked down and walking paths closed, Barbara and Robert took to walking in that cemetery. The juxtaposition of the words “corona” and “walker” caught Barbara’s attention. She began researching this unknown young woman, thinking imaginatively about what her life might’ve been like. Because, for instance, she might’ve been named after the sun’s corona during a lunar eclipse, there’s a photograph of a 2024 eclipse (by Robert) included in the book. According to the Hermes Gallery, along with this chapbook, the exhibition that came out of this project, Diadem, included found objects, photographs, and a poem. The show has come down now, and I didn’t see it, but the chapbook gives me a sense of what it might’ve been like.
There are two essays in this chapbook, one by Barbara and one by Robert. Hers shows how what we know about Corona Walker’s life, which is very little, enabled her to think in many different directions, exploring nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, the ways the colonialism and industrialism and environmental devastation shaped the city where she lives, the connections between Dartmouth and the Triangle Trade I remember learning about in elementary school (enslaved Africans sent to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations, the sugar shipped north and exchanged for dried cod, the dried cod sent south to feed those enslaved workers), the diseases that might’ve carried off an 18-year-old woman. “This is my intangible heritage,” she writes, the absent, invisible, silent existence of people I cannot know.” I found the multiple directions this one brief life carried Barbara to be fascinating. I wonder if one could pick any worn headstone in any cemetery and, through a combination of diligence, luck, and imagination, show how other lives and locations are woven together.
Robert’s essay is a brief, theoretical exegesis on the Corona Walker project: its connections to walking, deep time, and the absence of its central subject. The work constructs “a speculative history,” “an exploratory biography where no chronicle exists. The writing approaches the presence of an absence.” Why does Corona Walker–or the other souls resting in that cemetery–matter? “The past haunts the present and defines the future.” Yes, it does. I’m reminded of the Regina Indian Industrial School cemetery on Pinkie Road, a place I wrote about in Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, and the way that place, and the 38 First Nations children buried there, have shaped the present in this city, this province. For decades, those graves were unmarked; the cemetery was located far from where the school was, now the site of a youth-detention facility. So many forgettings, and yet the haunting continues. It would continue, I think, even without any tangible sign of the past. It would just be harder to see. But if we look carefully, we’ll begin to notice, to understand.
Becoming Corona Walker is the result of that kind of careful looking. If you would like a copy, you can find the artist’s email address online. Perhaps some unsold copies are left.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to go for walks. Walking helps ease my anxiety about the Covid-19 pandemic–at least sometimes. Other times, despite my intentions, I end up staying in the house, listening to the news and worrying, or trying to manage teaching online, which has turned out to be a lot more work than I had imagined. Turning off the radio, shutting down Facebook, that would help; and yet sometimes it’s very hard to do. And often, when I do get outside, walking doesn’t help. It just gives me a chance to ruminate and play out worst-case scenarios in my mind. I don’t imagine I’m alone in any of this.
My first walk, once the sidewalks were free of ice, was a rather long trudge to the university and then around Wascana Lake–long enough that my feet, tender after a winter without much walking, blistered. It was a sunny afternoon, and the path around the lake was packed with people, most of whom had not apparently heard of the term “social distancing.” I haven’t been back there since. Maybe it would be okay early in the morning, or when the weather is bad, but there are other places to walk that are less crowded, and possibly more interesting, too.
