Reconstructing Place through Creative Mapping: A Workshop and Gallery Exhibition in Partnership with the Kansas City Veterans Writing Team

Written By Casey Clark

Abstract

This article describes and shares the results of a workshop and subsequent gallery show aimed at providing members of the Kansas City Veterans Writing Team with a geography-based perspective on writing about place. The workshop focused on creative mapping via collage to take a more contemplative and intuitive approach to link identity, experience, and place. After making the place-collage, the participants developed a creative writing response in dialogue with the collage loosely following the ekphrastic tradition in poetry where the poet responds to a physical piece of art. Each collage and writing piece was then exhibited in a gallery show, Creative Mapping, which included other local artists. The workshop and show were held together through the theme of exploring how the item-identity-place nexus can be understood as accretive rather than linear.

Maps ultimately testify to our belief in the value of exploration, whether the compass is pointed inward or out. To do so is to appreciate the value of the mind as a dynamic vessel of exploration; it does not travel according to the limits of the compass rose, but moves by association. (Hall 1996)

How to engage with the lived experiences of places with all their material and forceful gatherings and dissipation? (Hawkins 2014b)

The growth of creative geographies and geocreativity over the past several years within geography has been well documented (Boyd 2017; Hawkins 2014a; Madge 2017; Marston and De Leeuw 2013). In addition to the study and production of creative work by geographers, there has been a concerted effort to engage with different communities to share the power of a geographic perspective with respect to place-making, public art, and public pedagogy (Schuermans, Loopmans, and Vandenabeele 2012). As Fuller and Askins (2010, 655) remind us, “at the heart of public geographies is the basic notion of being in conversation with publics” and a way geographers can act as “catalysts” for connection. When public geographies incorporate art “the embodied and relational encounter with artworks creates a new thinking because when viewers interact with art, their imagination opens, and this allows them to break away from pre-conceived categories, and thus, new thoughts can emerge” (Degarrod 2013, 405). This paper shares the results of a collaboration between a geographer and an art historian who facilitated an arts-based public geographies workshop aimed at providing members of the Kansas City Veterans Writing Team (KCVWT) with a creative geography-based experience on writing place through collage and a subsequent gallery exhibit of the team’s visual and textual art to create connective encounters between the civilian public and military service members and their families.

The nexus of place-making, public art, and pedagogy in relation to the military is particularly fraught with complexity because of the “difficult knowledge” (Britzman 1998; Zembylas 2014) gleaned from learning about state violence, survivor trauma, and servicemember empowerment and/or trauma that may challenge ongoing state propaganda in relation to memorializing/celebrating warfare for national identity construction (Curti 2008; Drozdzewski, Waterton, and Sumartojo 2019; Hannun and Rhodes 2018; Tyner, Kimsroy, and Sirik 2015). Geographers have explored how this complexity can be seen in Cambodia. On the one hand, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK; the Khmer Rouge) used traditional poetry practices as a form of public pedagogy to cultivate their desired political consciousness among their people (Tyner, Kimsroy, and Sirik 2015). On the other hand, the devastating violence committed by the regime has resulted in an ongoing need to educate younger citizens about what occurred and publicly accessible murals painted in rural areas are helping to maintain historical memories (Hannun and Rhodes 2018). In positive and negative ways then, “art can serve to destabilize, question, and overthrow hegemonic narratives, as well as open space for consideration of the past and allow for alternative futures” (Hannun and Rhodes 2018, 335).

“Whereas learning about an event or experience focuses on the acquisition of qualities, attributes, and facts, so that it presupposes a distance (or, one might say, a detachment) between learner and what is learned, learning from an event or experience is of a different order, that of insight” (Britzman 1998, 117). For example, in exploring the memorial to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii during World War II, Drozdzewski, Waterton, and Sumartojo (2019, 257 and 260) argue that physical memorial sites act as “an anchor between ‘now’ and ‘then’” and provide “an illustration of the way memory-work is contingent upon a visitor’s own histories and memories.” Degarrod’s (2013, 410) public art project, Geographies of the Imagination, about political exiles in Chile demonstrates that memory-work in non-memorial sites can also provide an “experience that is sensorial, experiential, and bodily, and is one that creates space for altering one’s understanding of the world and hence creates social change.”

The use of arts-based methods with American veterans has followed two tracks, both of which aim to create new ways for service members and their families to reckon with their service experiences. One track uses clinical settings to do art therapy which is “an integrative mental health and human services profession that enriches the lives of individuals, families, and communities through active art-making, creative process, applied psychological theory, and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship” (AAA 2017). The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) initiated the Creative Forces art therapy program in partnership with the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs (Hutter 2017). The program focuses on how creative work can help with the estimated 500,000 veterans currently living with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and Post-traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) (NEA n.d.). One of the most publicized programs coming out of the Creative Forces work has been Behind the Mask: Revealing the Trauma of War (Alexander n.d.). This program was run out of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and facilitated a creative experience where veterans made physical face masks representing how they felt about themselves, their injuries, and their service.

The second track is providing veterans with access to arts-based opportunities in non-clinical, non-therapy-based settings to learn skills for self-expression. For example, the nonprofit group Military Experience & the Arts (MEA) publishes short stories, essays, poems, and artwork through their own journals (MEA 2019). They provide veterans and their families with free one-on-one mentorship to help develop their written or visual art. Likewise, the nonprofit Kansas City Veterans Writing Team’s (KCVWT) mission is to help veterans and family members use the power of writing to process their experiences whether war-related or not (MIAA n.d.). The group is run by writers and does not provide any direct mental health therapy; instead, the hope is that participants will learn, and positively benefit from, writing.

Each year, the KCVWT hosts a fall workshop series where over five consecutive Saturday mornings, local and national writers lead three-hour workshops on all aspects of the craft of writing. It so happened that they were interested in exploring bringing in other creative options at the same time that (a) Urbanik had been doing training in collage techniques and thinking about collage and geography, and (b) Urbanik met members of the KCVWT group through a poetry reading and photography exhibit DiCandeloro had put on related to veterans at the University of Missouri Kansas City in 2018. After Urbanik initially conceived of the idea to do a creative mapping workshop for the veterans, DiCandeloro planned an associated gallery exhibit and both were presented to the KCVWT board in January 2019. We then refined the vision with board members over the next several months and KCVWT received funding from the Missouri Humanities Council to add the creative mapping workshop and gallery exhibit to the Fall 2019 workshop series.

WHY CREATIVE MAPPING AND PLACE COLLAGE?

Urbanik’s serendipitous and simultaneous encounter with Stephen Hall’s (1996) essay I, Mercator and a collage class exercise on layering and depth inspired by urban walls filled with piecemeal remnants of public flyers triggered a realization that a place-collage could be a viable way of connecting place experience with creative mapping—an artistic approach to maps “affirming that maps can be personal visions of the world and not simply objective representations” (Caquard 2011, 268; Harmon 2004, 2009).

Hall’s essay explores the ways in which geography, like memory, is associative: 

The surpassing virtue of Mercator’s 1596 projection, of course, was that it facilitated ocean-going navigation, which in turn enabled and expedited further exploration. Just so, by rearranging the lines we privately knit, we enable and expedite our own exploratory thoughts; and if the world is changing much faster than it did for Mercator, at the same time it provides many more possibilities for connection, understanding, evolution. As we nose around these new-found territories, we may begin to create an ever more complex and useful geography of survival: atop our maps of land, sea, planet, chromosome, cosmos we superimpose maps of pain, of revelation, of joy, of disappointment. (Hall 1996, 16)

Reflecting on his notions of how we all carry a personal atlas with us—an atlas that is not linearly connected to events in place—but one that can synthesize an accretion of responses to a place and/or multiple places led back to geographic notions of places as “not closed and contained but engaged with other spaces and places” (Hutchinson 2012, 35). This idea of accretion of place experiences linked to the collage class exercise on layering. The collage exercise itself was focused on “letting go” of making something specific appear through multiple rounds of adding and tearing off collage pieces—much in the way urban flyers are layered on and ripped off allowing glimpses of previous flyers to peak through. For Urbanik, this ultimately led to the idea that you could make a place collage that tries to access the layers of affective encounters in place along with the understanding that encounters in place are always linked to experiences in other places.

As it turned out, other geographers had already been thinking about and successfully using collage/bricolage/montage forms as an arts-based practice for personal and communal engagement with experience, body, and place (Hawkins 2014b; Madge 2017; Sharp and Smith 2014) affirming that this particular collage technique of adding and removing layers to build a topography of personal encounter was a valid option for work with KCVWT workshop participants. Collage is a practice of “bringing things together” (Hawkins 2014b, 59) and is seen as “ideal for disturbing, shaking up, and overturning appearances. It cracks open the surface of things …” (Doel 2014, 10). In addition, the collage method required no previous art experience and no extensive materials expense or set up. Iterative conversations with DiCandeloro and KCVWT board members led to developing a workshop for veterans to explore how they would respond to a different (i.e., non-verbal) form of place reflection and how it could help their writing.

The place collage was directly linked to the writing workshops in two ways: the process of writing itself and where participants were writing about. In relation to the process of writing, we framed the place collage as a method the participants could use to brainstorm ideas, memories, and details linked to their place of choice. We talked about how sometimes being able to do things with your hands, or having specific research to do can allow the more subconscious aspects of writing to help distill the essentials. In this way, the place collage became an invitation to “do something” while the muse worked internally thereby allowing participants to create-within-creating. In other words to keep the creative paths open no matter what. While writing is already difficult enough, we felt that the place collage—as technique—could be valuable tool for helping them move through writing blocks and/or inspiring new connections and details for their writing.

In relation to the “where” participants were writing about, the collage was presented as a Place-oriented Experiential Technique which is defined as a generative technique “that engage[s] an array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, thoughts, ideas and actions, which writers can use to evoke literary sense of place” (Mundell 2018, 8). We asked them to consider it as a valuable exercise for excavating details and building associations that make descriptions about the places of their writing come alive for readers. The process of adding and removing layers would hopefully help them consider how their experiences in places are not static but instead layered with meanings from all that had come before and after (Price 2004; Ward 2014). A particularly strong example of what we were aiming for comes from veteran and writer Brian Turner in his description of a night patrol in Iraq: 

Soldiers, determined and bored and searing with adrenaline, enter the house with shouting and curses and muzzle flash, det cord and 5.56mm ball ammunition. The soldiers enter the house with pixelated camouflage, flex-cuffs, chem lights, door markings, duct tape … The soldiers enter the house having just ordered a new set of chrome mufflers on eBay for the Mustang stored under blankets in a garage north of San Francisco. The soldiers enter the house with only nine credits earned toward an associate’s degree in history from the University of Maryland. They kick in the door and enter the house with the memory of backyard barbecues on their minds. (Turner 2014, 69–70)


In this excerpt, he deftly links the where of the moment for the soldiers entering a home with the layers of place experience each individual soldier was simultaneously experiencing through their connections to home and their lives outside of military service. The Hall essay was given to each participant to use as a base for reflection on the project and the Turner book was recommended (even though many of them had already read it).

THE WORKSHOP: RECONSTRUCTING PLACE THROUGH CREATIVE MAPPING

The creative mapping workshop was held on 5 October 2019, at the Kansas City Public Library Plaza Branch from 9 to 12:30pm. The eleven participants, however, had been working on collecting images for their pieces since the first workshop on 5 September when we gave an overview of the process and invited them to participate. The participants represented the Air Force (1), the Army (5), family of service members (2), the Marines (1), and the Navy (2). The time frame covered the 1940s to the present and the primary locations included Canada, Germany, Iraq, North Korea, Vietnam, and the United States.

Each week the participants were tasked with gathering visual material on the time and place relevant to their writing interests. Material requests included materials of significance (e.g., handbooks, maps, forms, letters, patches), markers of self-identification (e.g., religion, music, ethnicity, sexuality, tattoos, books), images of sensory experiences (e.g., sounds, smells, tastes, touch, sights), and images conveying environmental contexts (e.g., plants, animals, landforms, weather, light, temperature). The materials could be from their own memorabilia or culled from magazines, newspapers, and the internet. The only requirements were that they needed to be copies if they were original photographs or documents and that they were tearable (i.e., no cardboard or laminated images). They were also permitted to gather small physical items that could be glued or hung from the final collage (e.g., small medals or pins). We provided all the other materials including the collage base, glue, markers, stickers, scissors, sealant, and world maps and maps related specifically to each participant’s selected time and location.

The first half of the workshop was spent gluing successive layers of images down on the collage base which was an 8×11-inch piece of ¾ inch plywood. The participants were asked to put down five to seven layers of images and to do so in an intuitive manner paying attention only to covering the surface and blending small, medium, and large images so that the layers would avoid a strict geometry. Participants were encouraged to rip large pieces apart, to let images overhang the edge, and to turn their collage bases regularly to get different perspectives and placements. Some participants followed these guidelines while others brought their own diagrams/layouts that they wanted to start with.

After allowing the layers to dry for a short period, the participants were then tasked with “revealing” the layers of place they had compiled by using toothpicks to pull-up and tear-off sections. Using the toothpicks allowed them to try and selectively remove layers, to scrape off bits and pieces of layers, and to make more organic shapes. They then did another round of pasting down more image pieces either to fill in areas or to re-place material that had been torn off and they wanted to put back in. The goal was to build out some type of topography to the collage so that it had a depth and could convey the idea of their experience (or the experience they were writing about if not their own) as an accretion of place encounter rather than a linear this-then-that-then-this visual story. The last steps of the workshop were to use pens, colored pencils, and markers to add dimension, apply important words, and convey additional emotional layers to the collage images. Stickers and any physical artifacts were also glued, stapled, and/or tacked in.

While the collage portion of the workshop ended on 5 October, the participants used the remainder of the workshops to develop a piece of writing that came out of what they were learning in the writing-focused workshops and from ideas and responses generated by making their collages.

THE GALLERY SHOW: CREATIVE MAPPING

DiCandeloro managed the gallery show portion and worked with Studios Inc., a Kansas City based nonprofit that provides studio space, professional development, networking, and exhibitions for mid-career artists in the metro area, on designing the exhibit which ran for 4 weeks in November 2019. While the workshop itself was an arts-based public geographies project related to writing place, we felt it necessary to do the gallery exhibit as a way of extending the connective and catalyst links between public geographies and public pedagogies. The acts of writing and creating art are very personal and reside within a constricted space, once they are shared with a public audience there is a shift into an expanded space where there is room for dialogue to occur. In essence, the exhibit can be “understood as a vector for feelings of identity and belonging, through which historical events come to have an enduring impact on our emotions and understanding” (Drozdzewski, Waterton, and Sumartojo 2019, 257) as well as “a venue for creating empathy” (Degarrod 2013, 410). The exhibition brochure follows this line of thought by stating that: 

In Creative Mapping, art and text act as domain and range for memory and place. Together, memory and place allow for a distinct realm of creativity and production. Creative Mapping connects the experience of military service with signification in art and literature. Personal experience and item-identity are revealed to be accretive rather than linear. The gallery becomes a space where memory, place, and service inform a world of contemplation and exploration.

Each collage was hung at eye level against a medium gray background square. The gray background allowed the collage to stand out from the gallery wall and provided a sense of depth and subtle framing for each collage. Next to each collage was the associated piece of writing and didactic (author and title) on standard gallery quality poster board. The eleven collage sets took up one entire gallery wall and gave visitors the space to see the collages as a whole and to view, read, and experience each person’s set of work individually. The ordering of the pieces was based on esthetic balance because some pieces had three-dimensional elements (e.g., place skeletons, army issues can openers, dog tags, money) and others had more/less movement. The KCVWT artists’ pieces were joined by the works of four local artists who work with general themes around place-making and abstract mapping. On opening night, emotions and excitement ran high. KCVWT participants were accustomed to writing and while some had published none of them had ever had their creative work displayed in an official gallery exhibition.

According to Studios Inc. Associate Director Robert Gann: 

When art and community come together, a bridge is built towards perceptive understanding. Visual art routes a spectator on a journey, that encourages discussion behind meaning and truths. Creative Mapping invited Studios Inc. guests on this adventure, to delve into the concepts of memory and place. Collaborating with D2 Research and the Kansas City Veterans Writing Team, Studios Inc. was able to curate a highly influential exhibition. The success of the event was gauged by the high number of visitors that attended, and numerous responses to the work displayed. Studios, Inc. experienced a heightened number of guests during this period, boasting 400 + visitors that traveled through the exhibition. An interactive board was created to gauge the audience’s insight regarding the concept of creative mapping, which provided a variety of short narratives and even some mini-art work. Studios Inc. was also able to incorporate works from our collection, that related to concepts of mapping, this helped to facilitate sales, which fund our non-profit organization mission towards Mid-Career Artists. (Gann, 12 January 2020, email)



CONCLUSION

As Schuermans et al. (2012, 3) remind us, “public pedagogy through art is about creating ‘transitional spaces’ where individuals are challenged to face the ambivalences that result from encounters with diversity.” Additionally, our combination of place collage, creative writing, and gallery exhibit builds upon Tyner et al.’s identification of “the progressive, transformative potential of creative interventions, of the salience of learning outside of the formal educational institutions, and the possibilities of experiential forms of learning” (Tyner, Kimsroy, and Sirik 2015, 1295). Geographers recognize that accessing the “living memory of the survivors [and/or their family members] who have the opportunity to tell their stories is often the most powerful form of historical education, since the public can be personally connected to events of the past by association with the storyteller” (Hannun and Rhodes 2018, 344). For these reasons we consider the workshop and gallery show a success both for the KCVWT and for us as a geographer and an art historian because we were able to help multiple audiences explore and reflect on the links between item (creative mapping collage)—identity (personal perspective)—place (location of written piece). Furthermore, in putting the collages in dialogue with the writing pieces in the gallery we also created experiential space for workshop participants and exhibit attendees to reflect on how the layers depicted in the collages link to geographic “understanding of place as something relational, unfinished, and dynamic” (Hones 2008, 1310) thereby allowing each individual to bring in yet another layer of understanding related to their own memories and experiences.

We were surprised by a couple of things that should we run the workshop again with this or any other group we will be able to take into account. One problem was not unfamiliar to any faculty member—getting people to follow the directions. Although we asked participants to bring copies of important material and to bring the requested amount of images we found nearly universally these directions were ignored. We would invest more time along the way reminding them about the specific needs for the images. Another problem for some was the apparent distress caused by asking them to cover up and tear off images they had selected for the collage. We found in talking with them that the majority of the resistance to this part of the collage process was related to their military backgrounds where the focus of everything was on grids and order. The participants found it very difficult to let this part go for the collage and some were able to do so more than others. While this did change the end result visually, we felt it was better to allow them to move through the process of creating and sharing their images than to try and force everyone to conform to our vision because, after all, they were deeply engaging with the experience of creating a place-based collage.

Positive feedback included the spontaneous yet deep sharing that went on between participants at the end of the workshop. Interest and support for each other’s collages, the reasons for the materials that were included, and the places they selected opened the group up to each other in a way that gave them more storytelling time together rather than the other workshops which stayed focused on the writing itself. We had several participants thoroughly enjoy making the collages and one, who is working on a book about a family member who served in World War II, said he wanted to make a collage like this for each chapter of his book.

In the end, however, the participants did create stunning place collages and powerful written pieces that they will be able to have as a success for themselves and as a reminder of writing tools they can access anytime. They also got a glimpse of what it means to think and write place and we hope that also helps them in their future writing. Finally, that over 400 people saw the exhibit at Studios Inc. means that a large segment of the gallery-going community in Kansas City were also exposed to KCVWT experiences generating a powerful dialogue between civilians and service members and their families.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the Kansas City Veterans Writing Team Leaders for believing in this project, to the participants for taking a chance on doing something new, to Linda Link and Robb Gann for their exhibition expertise, and to the staff and interns at Studios Inc. for supporting and hosting the exhibit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Urbanik

JULIE URBANIK, Ph.D., is a consultant and independent scholar in Kansas City, MO. E-mail: julie.urbanik@gmail.com. Her research interests include creative mapping, human-animal relations, and criminal defense mitigation.

Poppy DiCandeloro

POPPY DICANDELORO is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Missouri Kansas City, Kansas City, MO 64110 and co-founder of D2 Research. E-mail: prdwdf@mail.umkc.edu. Her research interests include creative mapping, curatorial practices, the language of esthetics, and material culture.

Casey Clark
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