In this creative collaboration, Ben Smith, Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth, worked with artist and archaeologist Rose Ferraby to combine speculative fiction and visual art, exploring new possibilities for mapping our changing planet.
The project draws on a wide-ranging tradition of maps and travelogues, from aboriginal ‘dreamings’ to geological surveys and explorers’ accounts of ‘phantom islands’ and imagined trade routes across an Arctic free of ice. Rose and Ben explored how these historic techniques and discourses – with their tall tales and shifting truths – could be adapted to provide new ways of engaging with the current uncertainty of climate change, offering new and unexpected insights into the very real but no less bewildering landscapes and seascapes of the Anthropocene.
Ben and Rose are developing this project into a book and a series of public exhibitions for 2022.
