Trails Project
Susan Robb, Paul Rucker, and Stokley Towles
King County Regional Trails System
A mash-up of art interventions invigorates the life and landscapes of King County’s trail system.
A card game, a cello composition, a set of scents. These are a few of the site-specific art experiences interdisciplinary artists Susan Robb, Paul Rucker, and Stokley Towles created to celebrate King County’s Regional Trail System (RTS), one of the nation's most extensive multi-use off-road networks, with more than 175 miles of trails for bicycling, hiking, walking, and horseback riding.
From April to September 2010, the Trails Project featured a series of experiential artworks, both on the trails and online. Each offering activated the RTS in a new way and reflected what Robb calls “the variety, vastness, and transformative nature” of the network. Together, she, Rucker, and Towles spent six months exploring the trails before sharing their individual and collaborative creations at several public events. A temporary project website, which remained live until March 2011, also allowed them to chronicle their experiences in a collection of photos, videos, writings, and sounds.Continue Reading ›
Rucker, a cellist and visual artist, composed and performed Water Pieces at a concert and art-making event that used water and painting tools sourced from the Snoqualmie Valley Trail. Robb distilled a set of custom-blended fragrances from materials she collected—such as plants, berries, pine needles, and horse manure—and presented them as Scent of the Trails. Along with Stokley Towles, she also created The Long Walk, a 40-mile trek from Seattle to Snoqualmie Falls, in which participants walked for three days as they connected with the region's landscapes and each other. All three artists came together to create an interactive excursion along the scenic Soos Creek Trail, during which Rucker performed a composition inspired by a map of the trail while roughly 70 participants played Caribou Cards, a game Robb and Towles designed, which offered prompts and prescriptions for taking a walk in a fresh way.