example star story

August

“Open Mouth”

Harvest moon

blue moon.

Coyotes and crickets howling or singing

great big mouths open wide

wait ting,

to catch something more than

something to fill this heavy emptiness

swallowing each night

the fly on the dusty windowsill

swept off

in a sunlit suspense of particles

too soft, too small, too ever.

With cracking skin and stiff lips I count the steps home

mouth closed

tongue

too swollen.

Whitney Polich, 29, Great Falls, MT

Want to be part of an art collaboration?

As a child, my siblings and I built forts outside fashioned from sticks and sheets – magical places where imagination and reality blurred the boundaries between what we could hold in our tiny hands and those things too large or too shapeless that we could only pretend to hold. Our forts were embellished with small treasures who’s only worth was in the fantastic stories we made up about their use, symbolism, and history. At night, we would camp out in our forts watch the stars and make up more stories about epic battles, bizarre creatures, and mythic beings while shining our flashlights across the moving fabric. These experiences eventually led to a deep understanding of place finding its roots in mythology, imagination, and poetry as we attempted to explain and understand the vast world around us.

I intend to create a similar experience as a site responsive installation at the Northcutt Steele Gallery. The installation will be a constructed environment allowing adults to rekindle a similar sense of wonder, imagination, and experience of place-making. Galaxies, stars, and most specifically constellations are a means of delving into these questions about defining our place in the cosmos with a poetic, non-scientific voice. This work attempts to blur the boundary between the physical (real) and the non as a way of opening space for new possibilities of explanation.

One part of this project includes “star maps”, which are fictional constellation drawings made from rocks on paper. As a collaborative project, I’m looking for anyone interested in writing an imaginary myth for these constellations. The structure can be either narrative or poetic and must be highly imaginative. Have fun, be weird - nothing is out of bounds. The plan is to then create and publish either a book or a zine (depending on cost) for the show, which all participants will be credited in.

Many constellation stories were created for practical navigational purposes and as a means of recording oral history. Often regarded as folklore, the stories are historical, spiritual, and are typically embedded with a moral or a way of explaining the unexplainable. Many cultures, even going back to ancient cave paintings, have made the ungraspable nature of floating galactic matter more tangible by creating meaning through these stories.

I highly recommend reading "Things That Are" by Amy Leach. It is the most imaginative, entertaining book of wonder-full essays attempting to explain the world and all its phenomena around us – place making at its most playful. This will help to put you in a mindset of breaking out of the norm! Invent words, invent creatures…explain this world as if you didn’t know it.