Imaginary Voyages

Desert Mapping Workshop with Ainslie Murray

What might happen when we start mapping a landscape and our relationship to it from an inverted position? How can we communicate through the upside down, the back to front and the almost-but-not-quite? In this workshop we’ll examine a range of mapping approaches that disrupt attachment to the known ‘truths’ of landscape and how we see ourselves within it.

We will take a series of iconic climbing routes in Joshua Tree National Park as provocations for collaborative creative action. We will look at collated directions, photographs, drawings and reflections on these routes, and develop new visual narratives across other physical practices in the park such as hiking, camping, riding and star-gazing. We will cast ourselves and each other into wild and fun spatial stories, informed by our collective experience, and work together to draw, shape, cut and connect components of our lives and the park landscape in a sequence of large black and white 2D compositions.

Adults 16 and over are welcome to this workshop, and no creative experience is necessary. Workshop places are limited to 6. Principal techniques include drawing and tracing with pencils and paint markers, cutting with scissors and/or scalpels, taping and gluing with spray adhesives. Please note the co-creation of the artworks will be photographed and filmed, and you’ll be asked to sign a release form in order to participate.

Biography Ainslie Murray is an established interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. Her practice investigates unstable, itinerant and mobile forms of architecture in remote and volatile environments. Her work questions how we might live together in increasingly precarious and turbulent conditions. She composes spatial scenarios that enable her to interrogate this question through durational inhabitation focussed on everyday life. Her work has been exhibited in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, UK and USA.