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A wobbly map

A wobbly mapCoral Brookes with Lumsden Primary School, A Wobbly Map (2019)

From Summer to Autumn 2019, artist Coral Brookes, collaborated with the young people at Lumsden Primary School to build a map for the 40th anniversary of Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Aberdeenshire. Coral shares more about the project below.

Starting with the idea of creating a time capsule, the project unfolded through a series of sessions where as a group we ‘revisited’ the village through anecdotes, memories, interpretations and imagination, mapped as alternative (public) monuments of the locality.

We began in the archive, delving into cumbersome plans of the school extensions, scraps of scribbled notes, crumpled leaflets, dated postcards and documents. We responded through building blueprints from ink indentations from found objects. Our drawings-documents quickly slid from making physical sites and spaces, think trees and soft grass, to being swallowed up in whirlwind worlds of warriors, mythical creatures, houses with huge cats, old pets and warm wobbly faces.

The experience of everyday treads of tarmac trails continuously toppled into the group’s subjective stories and were eeked out through methodologies for making and thinking, combined with my own naivety and nosiness for these imaginative worlds brought to life in collaboration with the group.

Blind walks, wafflings and wet clay; our wobbly map of monuments takes the form of a series of slippery articulations or sticky translations. It is consistently a map, but rendered through three forms; a sonic journey, a flag and this document, embodying the time capsule as a reimagined archive from the group’s perspective.

Here, this journey of the wobbly map is portable. We are inviting you to go out and about in Lumsden. Used in conjunction with the audio recording (available via the link below, navigate around Lumsden through the group’s voices. The monuments rendered on this map were all built by the group in the form of blueprints, drawings and cast impressions which exist here as a vocabulary of extruded forms, a coming together of our collaborative language for getting lost in worm holes as portals to this place.

Coral Brookes was a Lumsden Residency artist in 2019 at Scottish Sculpture Workshop. Read a blog post written by Coral after the first session with Lumsden Primary School.

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