ABOUT

A game was created by the bright imagination of my two nieces a couple of years ago when I was visiting or enjoying time all together during school holidays, whereby they created an adventure game - TEAM ARCTIC.

We were explorers in the frozen polar north around Scandinavia and Siberia towards Alaska, foraging for food as well as carrying lots of supplies, going fishing when we got to coastal areas off the ice shelf, fending off wolves, hiking around mountains, finding shelter during extreme blizzards in ice caves, building campfires to cook our fish catch of the day and eventually building Igloos.

After the first few times we were united playing TEAM ARCTIC, I set about to help fuel their imaginations during the times we weren't together by creating Oil Paintings showing scenes of our adventures. Further into the game after a couple of days we were united again as TEAM ARCTIC playing the game in a beautiful valley in Powys, Wales, next to a water pool fed by a natural spring where we were going fishing and built a new Igloo, I decided to create map paintings that were painted on the local Welsh Mudstone showing our trails in the snow over glaciers, around mountain passes and next to icy coastlines where we went fishing.

These map pieces are painted specifically so that several pieces can join together to create different parts of a map, yet they form a grander puzzle that needs to be solved as each map painting piece is also numbered sequentially, that can be solved for the keenest of eyes and leading to the initial motivation behind how the map paintings come together as a learning tool.

On the reverse sides of the stone map painting are written stories taken from memories of the game we played together on different days, with the exception of one that has a poem I wrote as well as the two Map Terrain Identifier Tool paintings made to assist in my nieces learning to read Topographical Maps, seeing as they both already have a keen interest at a young age for adventure and exploration documentaries, the natural world and wildlife.

In the Welsh valley where we played our game, I later went to collect local Mudstone looking for pieces of rock that show differences in texture and gradient. it was the stones texture that set the guidelines or rules for which areas are to be painted as icy glaciers and which areas are the sea, that can be seen in the photographs as each piece has areas that are rough and textured with some areas raised and flat surfaced. This is how I was able to identify pieces of Mudstone suitable for this project and then spend a long time figuring out how to join different pieces together.

After completing the map paintings and story writing on reverse sides they were all individually bubble-wrapped with 8 map pieces for each of my two nieces leaving 1 map piece for myself totaling 17, and gifted to them in blue boxes that I created our TEAM ARCTIC logo for, as well as printing out images of a historical drawn polar map, with printed photos of Igloos created by Inuits, handmade scrolls with the map number and map piece name title, a handwritten telegram letter in a wax-sealed envelope that I spent some time finding vintage arctic stamp images to print on the envelope, as well as a bigger scroll each with instructions on how to play the mystery map puzzle.

As my two nieces were showing an interest in Art and math at school, this became the inspiration behind creating the mystery puzzle code embedded in the map paintings which act as a learning tool that over time we find out the hidden mystery puzzle code to learn about Pi - π.

The stone map oil paintings are numbered as follows:
Map 3.1
Map 41
Map 59
Map 26
Map 53
Map 58
Map 9
Map 7
Map 93
Map 23
Map 84
Map 62
Map 64
Map 33
Map 8
Map 32
Map 79