Of Stories and Travel

An original collage & my first 2019 challenge

My first postcard art challenge 2019 ~ Amsterdam

I’ve written quite a few blogposts about travel. But how did it all start? How did I go from the germ of an idea of Armchair Travel 30 years ago, to creating an online event combining Art and Travel?

Let me tell you a story …once upon a time, in a place far from where I now live, I had a job in a tiny municipal library. This library was little more than a room tacked on to the Shire Offices. I arrived in the town to become the branch librarian, attracted by the snow capped mountains and rural ambience. I was young, ambitious and filled with ideas.

However the library was undervalued and underused, an afterthought in a farming community more used to being outside on the land than reading books. My first challenge - how to bring more people to the library and make it a central hub, the place to be.

 I looked at some of the elderly patrons, many used walking sticks and had trouble reading the fine print of books. But they enjoyed talking with each other about stories. What better way to engage them, than to order in films from the State Film Centre (as it was then called) and screen films with a 16m projector.

So it started…Once a month we would hold Armchair Travel sessions at the library, screening films mostly about travel, from railways in Wales to the mountains of China. A fellowship developed. More people came. We moved to a bigger library and kept running the program, even though the windows were bigger and needed heavy black plastic pinned up before the film screenings began.

Fast forward to 2019 when I started my fledgling online arts mentoring. One challenge I did was an envelope art/postcard challenge all to do with travel. I posted videos from the verandas of hotels in Amsterdam and in the mountains of Switzerland, encouraging creative art making with simple materials to hand.

Then came 2020 when the world stopped travelling. It seemed trite and insensitive to talk about places we couldn’t go to, even in our dreams when so many people around the world were suffering and dying from the pandemic. I responded by running online programs about creating through crisis and building resilience.

Now we are in 2022, the world is opening up to possibilities and I am preparing to go travelling again. It means I can host another Travel + Art challenge. A simple prompt to unlock travel dreams and memories with so many different ways of creating. It is going to be fun seeing what others create.

Mansfield Shire Offices 1984 - the library is the tiny room far right

The expanded shopfront library - moved to the main street in 1988