Beautiful place/beautiful view journey scrolls and writing structure in the hea(r)t of the southern hemisphere

This article documents a re-iterated workshop which was presented firstly to groups of undergraduate students in New Zealand, from a variety of disciplines, not all of which were arts based, who had elected to take a paper in creative process as a minor component of their degree. For these undergraduate students, the workshop was designed to introduce a system for entering a zone, a creative pre-space, which would be an effective preparation for writing creatively.

The same workshop was then presented to groups of postgraduate Master of Fine Art and Master of Design students to improve the quality of their journal writing. For these students, the workshop was designed to introduce a performative series of actions which would help to disrupt preconceived notions, and introduce new ways of thinking, about the relationship between writing and creative practice.

In the workshop, all the students were invited to consider, with the careful scrutiny of a forensic scientist, the secret life of places. They were introduced to a system used by Japanese scroll artists who record the journey from a beautiful place to a beautiful view by making observational drawings of lateral views along the way, from regular vantage points, turning slowly through 180 degrees, until, having reached the destination, the beautiful view itself, their gaze is directed back to the starting point.

In the process of recording their own small journeys in this way, with rolls of paper and charcoal, students described experiencing a slower, embodied form of knowing which not only enlivened them to the secret life of places, but also gave them a tacit understanding about writing structure. The students, at undergraduate and postgraduate stages in their education, became aware of themselves simultaneously travelling, in a self-directed way, through space, whilst also being defined by that space. They expressed an awareness of this reciprocal relationship verbally, through drawings and in critical, self-reflective writing. The students absorbed the exercise as part choreography, part script and as a metaphor for academic writing, in which the end (which can rarely be fully anticipated) must be signalled by the beginning, and in which the introduction is often finally drafted last.

This article also explores the value of irregularity as a legitimate pedagogical strategy to inform journal writing, by empowering students to explore their own creativity through an autonomous process of critical self-reflection. The form of this article attempts to offer a model for a style of writing within this process which could be described as belonging to the genre of creative non-fiction.