A KM
“The everyday ways people leave their mark on the spaces they inhabit.”
Abby Lush – A students 1K walk home
For my final project, A KM, I wanted to focus on something simple but meaningful, the walk home. It’s a routine that feels ordinary, yet it shapes daily life for so many students. What caught my attention were the “desire lines” those unofficial trails people make by cutting across grass, dirt, or bushes instead of sticking to the sidewalks. These paths, though often overlooked, reveal how people naturally reshape their environment to fit their own needs. They are small, unspoken decisions that together reshape the campus over time.
My piece is a collage built from photographs I took of these paths across campus. To tie them into a larger perspective, I combined the images with a Google Maps view of a one-kilometre walk “home.” This layering connects personal movement my own daily walk with the broader collective patterns formed by hundreds of students choosing similar shortcuts. The contrast between the planned, orderly map and the messy, organic photos of desire lines points to the difference between official design and lived experience.
The process of making this work was very much about noticing. I walked through campus, deliberately paying attention to the marks left behind by repeated footsteps, and photographed the places where students had cut their own routes. Bringing these images together in a collage let me emphasize how widespread and important these paths are, even though they’re often dismissed as unimportant. I also chose to write the title directly on the work itself. To me, it mimics the way desire lines function as inscriptions left behind, written not in ink but in earth, by the collective weight of people moving through space.
If shown in a gallery, I picture this work on a large scale, maybe filling a whole wall or even an entire room with the photographs. Enlarged, the images would surround viewers, confronting them with how common these paths are. The impact would be bold and immersive, underlining how desire lines challenge the structure of constructed surroundings. By expanding the piece in this way, the installation would invite viewers to reflect on something familiar but rarely noticed, the everyday ways people leave their mark on the spaces they inhabit.
Progress/ closer look
In this image you can see how damanged and dead the grass is, because its a popular place on campus
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