PROJECT
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Walking the Grid is an evolving artistic research project and field archive documenting movement through Southampton and its surrounding landscapes.
Every project begins with fieldwork. Sites are identified through mapping, walking, observation, and material investigation before becoming the starting point for sculpture, installation, or temporary intervention. Photographs, coordinates, routes, collected materials, and field notes form an expanding record of these encounters.
Many of the works are temporary, made from locally sourced and biodegradable materials that are eventually reabsorbed into the landscape. As a result, this website functions not only as documentation, but as part of the practice itself: an evolving archive of research, experiments, and interventions that traces an ongoing dialogue between mapping, making, and place.
Walking the Grid asks what might happen if we stop treating the landscape as something simply to navigate, and instead come to understand it through walking, gathering, and making.
PRACTICE
Rabia Raja is a Southampton-based artist and MA Fine Art researcher whose practice explores mapping, embodied fieldwork, and the material construction of urban landscapes. Working across sculpture, installation, site-specific intervention, and documentation, her research investigates the relationship between digital representations of place and the physical experience of encountering it through walking.
Using mapping as a starting point, Rabia locates, gathers, and reconstructs materials sourced directly from the landscape, including clay, sand, soil, and concrete. By retracing industrial processes by hand, her work examines extraction, labour, ownership, and the political systems embedded within the ground beneath our feet. Rather than treating materials as commodities, her practice seeks to understand the city through its geology, infrastructure, and overlooked fragments.
Image by Luke Shears