Marlene Creates and Don McKay are Governor General’s Award winning artists. Creates is an environmental artist; McKay is a nature poet and essayist. Together, they have created a series of place-based art workshops to engage school-aged children in memory-mapping and climate mapping in Newfoundland. 

For the past 40 years, Marlene has used memory maps in her own artwork and she has led dozens of memory mapping workshops with all ages. Recent studies in cognitive science and psychology have found that “Raw intelligence, it seems, is intertwined with our brain’s spatial cognition aptitude. […] This insight has come at a time when young people in general are experiencing less and less demand to exercise their spatial navigation skills. […] [T]he sedentary, habitual, and technology-dependent conditions of modern living are changing how children and even adults use their brains.”
—M.R. O’Connor, “Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World,” St. Martin’s Press, NY, 2019.

The Artworks & Workshops

Marlene and Don’s project addressed both creative experiences in and representations of place, which have prospects for adaptability and transferability to other locations and all age groups. This project focused on students from a local elementary school in Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s, Newfoundland. Once at the poetry garden (located on Marlene’s property) students participated in guided walks through a six-acre (2.4 hectare) patch of old-growth boreal forest traversed by the Blast Hole Pond River in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland/ Ktaqmkuk. This site has been the focus of Marlene Creates’s work as an environmental artist since moving to the site in 2002.

One of the students described the process of drawing her memory map beautifully: 

“My pencil is me. I’m walking the path. I hike my way through my imagination.” — student participant

Each class experienced a different art form, as the site was animated by the following artists:

Katie Baggs, singer-songwriter on guitar and ukulele
Christine Carter, clarinet and moose horn
Marlene Creates, nature poetry
Jack Eastwood, shadow puppets of local wildlife
Florian Hoefner, accordion and percussion
Don McKay, nature poetry and moose horn
Louise Moyes, contemporary dance
Laura Temple, natural history

Immediately following the walks, each student drew a memory map, which illustrated some of what registered in the children’s memories from the terrain, including what they saw and heard during their multi-sensorial experiences in the boreal forest and along the Blast Hole Pond River. Notable is that these drawings are all memory maps of the same place and they are all completely (astonishingly) different.

Way-finding and global warming are entangled in a number of ways: Keeping a healthy hippocampus — the part of the brain involved in way-finding — might help mitigate anxiety over the climate crisis. Anxiety and despair lead to inaction. Providing these experiences and activities for children in The Boreal Poetry Garden is a way of encouraging their appreciation of the local boreal forest ecosystem, as well as providing an antidote to a dependence on technology. The children’s memory maps are about their subjective perceptions of this patch of old growth boreal forest — perceptions they gained by their 3-dimensional, embodied, and situated experiences on the ground. Creates and McKay believe it’s crucially important for children to learn about their environment through multi-sensorial experiences on the tangible land, as opposed to the increasing amount of time they spend looking at screens — both in and out of school.

The Reach

Marlene and Don held workshops for 96 children from five Grade 4 classes at Beachy Cove Elementary School in Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s, Newfoundland.  The students’ memory maps were exhibited in July 2024 in the café of a local garden centre. The exhibition also included a slide show with photographs by Sally LeDrew that illustrated the different performances and activities that the students experienced on the guided walks. 

Marlene and Don have put together a workshop toolkit for those who wish to lead memory map walks in their region. Marlene Creates’ & Don McKay’s Toolkit.