Creative Mapmaking for Wellbeing
Creative map making for wellbeing, is an arts for health and wellbeing project, aiming to reduce social isolation, connect participants to nature and acquire new skills to support wellbeing.
Spending time in nature is a powerful tool to improve our wellbeing. Creative map making as a format, allows participants to gain a deeper understanding and connection to the world, through identifying personal landmarks, sensory directions and experiencing the natural world in a novel and mindful way.
Sessions involve mindful walking practice, creative recording of sensory inputs from nature, and cognitive mapping (maps based on personal meaning rather than geography). Over the course of the programme, participants will create a collection of artistically recorded landmarks in a range of mediums. They will then have the opportunity to combine pages and contribute to a shared understanding of the area alongside the other participants.
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Reflect on what a space means to you, and how you fit into it. Are there landmarks beyond what you can see? How can we record these creatively?
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Walk with purpose, feeling and focus, drawing your mind to the present, your body and to the world around you.
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Sight is not the only sense that helps us find our way. Smell, hearing and touch also builds a picture of our surroundings.
Project Aims:
• Increase social engagement: join a group of likeminded individuals, taking part in collaborative art making.
• Increase connection to nature: spending time in nature to improve wellbeing.
• Acquisition of new reflective artistic skills: field sketching, zine making, map folding, collage and developing a mindful walking practice.
Why Maps?
Participant made map page- looking closely for similar man-made vs natural shapes and patterns (canoes and seed pods)
Engaging with nature in an emotive and sensory way allows people to connect with nature more deeply (5 Pathways to Nature Connection). The project takes maps away from their traditional use of orientation tools, to showing where you are in a more emotional, mindful and responsive way. They provide a snapshot of a location and your feelings towards it at one particular time.
A key theory that informs my work is Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan, 1995). Taking time to slow down, be present in your body and notice small details through techniques like "soft fascination"(Kaplan, 1995) is a valuable tool to replenish our attention, regulate our emotions and consider our part in the wider world.
This project presents creative map making as a tool to deepen our connection to nature and our surroundings whilst enabling participants to gain a new reflective skill that they can utilise in daily life.
Who would benefit?
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