A series of public artworks using walking figures, shadows and graphic route imagery to create a distinctive visual identity for a pedestrian route through the development.
Introduction
TRINITY WALKING ROUTE is a series of site-specific public artworks developed to mark and identify a pedestrian route through the surrounding urban environment.
Installed on existing street furniture, the individual panels use a consistent graphic language based on walking figures, movement, shadows and directional routes, allowing the artworks to function as both visual interventions and informal wayfinding markers.
Walking
The imagery focuses on the simple everyday act of walking through the city.
Fragments of figures — legs, feet and cast shadows — move across the panels, suggesting people entering, leaving or passing through the space.
Rather than depicting complete figures, the cropped imagery concentrates attention on movement and direction, allowing each panel to represent a moment within a longer journey.
Route and movement
Fine dotted and linear graphics introduce the idea of a route or trajectory, connecting the figures with the act of navigating the surrounding streets.
Some of the designs borrow from the visual language of diagrams, maps and correspondence, including framed areas and repeated dotted lines. These elements give the works the appearance of fragments from a larger navigational system without functioning as conventional signage.
The repeated title TRINITY WALKING ROUTE establishes a shared identity across the series.
Public realm
The artworks are deliberately modest in scale and integrated into existing elements of the streetscape rather than presented as isolated sculptural objects.
Attached to posts and street furniture, they are encountered gradually as people move through the area, creating a sequence of visual markers that reveal themselves along the route.
Their restrained black, grey and white palette allows the imagery to sit comfortably within the architecture while remaining clearly visible to pedestrians.
Community engagement
The project was developed alongside a programme of creative workshops with the local community, involving primary schools, young people and residents of local older people’s homes.
The sessions explored ideas around walking, movement, routes and the everyday experience of the surrounding area, allowing local participants to contribute observations and creative responses that informed the wider project.
This engagement helped root the artwork in the people who used the area, while reinforcing the project’s interest in movement through the public realm and the different ways people experience the same place.
Project archive
A dedicated project website documents the creative workshops and community participation in greater detail:
tompearman.co.uk/salford
Visual language
The designs combine simplified photographic imagery with line drawing and graphic notation.
The shadows cast by the walking figures are particularly important, reinforcing the relationship between the flat artwork and the real pavement and streetscape surrounding it.
This creates a subtle play between represented movement and actual movement, with pedestrians encountering images of other pedestrians as they travel through the space.
