Monday 11 May
Michelle Rowley
This has been an incredible trip for us all. We have done so much in such a short space of time and have achieved unexpectedly high rewards whilst being constantly challenged, facing our fears, having a lot of fun and making a lot of friends. We have learned much, much more about our individual capabilities and stretched ourselves as artists.
This was the first time I had led on both an international and a collaborative project. In the early stages of the planning for this trip, as far back as September '08, BYU's Joe Ostraff was enormously helpful in forming a focus for the project and especially since January when we began to turn plans into reality. Our joint positivity allowed us an easy agreement of primary ideas that would drive the project and gave me confidence in my ability to deliver an appropriate learning experience for both his students and mine.
Teaching students who's abilities and knowledge were unknown to me was a daunting thought. Now I've done it, and had such supportive feedback from the BYU students, I know not to worry. In fact the diverse expertise of the group was something that on this collaborative project was a great extra resource. Specialist skills were shared across the groups and this exchange of approaches and experiences was both gratifying to witness and richly rewarding for all.
In retrospect I now know that it was because of the atmosphere of respect, trust and mutual curiosity which we generated that allowed this to happen. We did this through a varied range of activities from presentations on our home city, of our individial art practices, introductions into book arts production, through sharing ideas and fears for the project and through the fast track to bonding – the camping expedition.
The 'Mapping the West' project has introduced many of us for the first time to the idea of 'wilderness', to what it means to us as a culture and why we might want to protect and revere wild states in nature. This direct experience has posed us, individually and collectively, with many questions about ourselves and our place in the world. We have also considered the cartographer's art of map making, of what we include and exclude in our topographical guides to landscape and of the narative of experience that is mostly unrecorded in grid references.
In travelling through this region we have made our own maps, which have been formed through memories of this amazing place, the stories we tell each other on our return and of the generosity and friendship of the people we met. This is what you will find in our books.
Thank you so much to Joe and his family, and Amy and Tali for putting us up and putting up with us and to all the staff and students at BYU.
