My research assignment was to investigate how artists are inspired by liminal spaces in the urban environment. I wanted to identify exactly what it was about canals and canal bridges that I found so compelling as an artist.

I analysed the work of Laura Oldfield Ford, whose work is based on "urban drifts", or unplanned walks around cities as a method of gathering experiential material and presenting it in the form of written and spoken word poetry as well as photographs and drawings.

I learned more about walking as an artistic process from a feminist point of view, and related it to my own on site research into using walking on the canal towpath to collect visual and psychogeographic ideas. I was particularly interested in the work of artists who have made the concept of walking in a city an act of activism; a way of highlighting social inequality by showing that non-male walkers and people with disabilities are not totally free to wander in cities as they felt unsafe or had issues with accessibility.

I included a discussion of graffiti culture in my research; for its widespread presence particularly in those "edgeland" spaces which aren't under CCTV surveillance. I wanted to clarify the nature of graffiti as subversive public art made by people whose tags and artworks imply that they feel free to express their presence wherever they wish.