“Collaborative drawing as an exploratory tool is like wandering; we never know what we’ll find or who we’ll meet along the way…”

These drawings come from DREAMING PLACE, an adventurous collaboration between Claire Coté (New Mexico) and Anna Keleher (Devon, England) and the people, places, plants, creatures and things of Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark (Ireland & Northern Ireland). On sunny days and rainy days the artists passed these drawings back and forth to dream imaginative Geopark worlds.

DREAMING PLACE is a project investigating dúlra – ecosystem, dúchas – heritage, aisling – dream. Based on an ancient Celtic tradition in which the land remembers everything, the project explores “dreams of place” in which the land speaks through the dreamer. The artists collaboratively inhabited the ancestral homelands of the cross-border Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark in Northern Ireland/Éire for 40 days and 40 nights in June and July 2011, and then brought the project back in the Place-Dreamer Pod to tour its homeland in April 2013.

During these itinerant residencies, Claire and Anna developed innovative techniques for total immersion in the diverse natural, cultural and dream ecologies of the Geopark. Field data was interpreted and shared via collaborative drawings, blog posts, radio broadcasts, Learning Log and Place-Dreamer’s Toolkit.

Dreaming Place Website
Claire and Anna Website