Beyond the Map is a project led by artist Emma Molony and inspired by Common Ground, the Dorset charity founded in 1983 to seek imaginative ways to engage people with their local environment. Common Ground have always placed Local Distinctiveness at the heart of everything they do. They explain this…

“Distinctiveness is about particularity in the buildings and land shapes, the brooks and birds, trees and cheeses, places of worship and pieces of literature. It is about history and nature jostling with each other, layers and fragments, old and new. The ephemeral and invisible are important too: customs, dialects, celebrations, names, recipes, spoken history, myths, legends and symbols”

Travel around the collaborative “map” of prints, words, images, stories, sounds. Zoom and move around the map, clicking on place markers to reveal the artworks, videos and more!

Keep scrolling beyond the map to find out more about both the project and artist Emma Molony.

During September and October 2021, artist Emma Molony worked within the Char Valley on a Heritage Lottery funded project for Dorset AONB to creatively “map” the villages and communities in the valley.

Emma is a local artist printmaker who ran these creative sessions to gather individual views to form a collaborative “map” of prints, words, images, stories, sounds. The finished interactive map is shown above.

As well as working with Charmouth Primary School, Emma will ran free drop-in sessions for people of all ages at Morcombelake, Whitchurch Canonicorum and Wootton Fitzpaine village halls.

Participants and contributors created an array of work for the map and more; including monoprint leaves from their favourite trees, screen-printing map tote bags, printing textured materials to hold special memories, recording stories with an oral historian, printing their own collagraph map, exploring huge old 1902 maps of the area, printing poems with wooden letterpress type and much more!

If you would like to get involved in the Beyond The Map project or would like to know more, please contact Emma Molony: beyondthemapproject@gmail.com

Or Sue Dampney, Dorset AONB Culture, Community & Learning: sue.dampney@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk / 01305 228242