Designing the Base
Creating an art piece and website was definitely taking the road less traveled by–and gratefully one supported by my advisors and mentors. Throughout this process, there were ups and downs, twists and turns, disorientation, and eventual clarity. In retrospect, I believe that straddling between the expectations of a graduate student in English and an ecological artist made encompassing both accuracy and instinctual vision much harder. As a writer, I want to create a nuanced, well-researched discourse–as an artist, I prefer creating simpler schematizations of figures, capturing their raw essence. To use multiple modes effectively, I would need to blur the lines between these different expectations and get out of my comfort zones.
Ultimately, I decided on collaging. After buying a 2’x4’ hardboard, I printed out maps of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming and began sketching national parks, reservations, and city hubs on them–areas where literature would be very specific. Washington and Oregon followed soon after, having their own wolf discourses. I measured out these maps onto the hardboard, where I faced another dilemma: How much literature would I be encompassing? How many regions and visuals? How many wolves, and which ones? What time period would all elements be in? Would I have enough time to create an accompanying website?
Stepping back, I had a realistic conversation with myself and decided that each state could potentially be its own piece–if I was making a concentration or a mural. With one semester to nurture and grow this project, I would need to go back to “simplicity,” which led me to settle my research and efforts on Idaho. I decided to build off of my initial research into Idaho Senate Bill 1211 and add more discourse to the landscape–expressing the abstraction and disruption views can have on spaces. Adding to this conviction, I have had more experience living in Idaho than other states in the Pacific Northwest, as well as speaking with researchers and locals here. I found myself leaning toward quality over quantity.
This decision helped immensely. Not only was I able to focus my research, but I was also able to provide CDIL with a more concrete outline of the website–primarily the interactive map.
From here, I compiled sources for each of Idaho’s seven regions–regions based on the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG)’s hunting regions (Panhandle, Clearwater, Southwest, Magic Valley, Southeast, Upper Snake, Salmon), because those are what determine hunting and trapping seasons, number of tags, and other interactions with wildlife presence.
After redrawing the base and mapping out regions and locations (for both Idaho and Montana, just in case I would integrate Montana sources), I decided to use the Senate Bill 1211 as the base of Idaho, since the policy affects the entire state. I wanted the words to literally shape the landscape, so I cut each sentence and glued them down in a spiral pattern, working from the top of the state down and into the middle.
As I did this, I had an additional copy of the bill for reference, highlighting each line that I glued down to make sure nothing got mixed up. After a very lengthy process, the final challenge was fitting the last page of the bill–I ended up using the passage bellow as Idaho’s border, because it contained the most potent and relevant information to wolf management:
Livestock and domestic animal owners may take all nonlethal steps they deem necessary to protect their property. …Wolves may be disposed of by any federal agency, state agency, private contractor, political subdivision of the state of Idaho, or agency of another state when the population has exceeded the recovery goals of the Idaho wolf conservation and management plan in an effort to maintain a balance of all wildlife populations.
– 2021 Legislation: Senate Bill 1211
This passage became a defining border, a line which, if crossed, determines a wolf’s fate. After some experimentation with printing on yellow paper, I cut out and glued those colored sentences around the border.