Mapping Pilgrimage – stitched cartography as spiritual practice and sacred reading

This paper explores enacted arts-based research of pilgrimage as essential to spiritual locatedness and journey. Maps are considered as a kind of sacred record or text in meaning-making, offering maps of pilgrimage created with needle and thread as records of spiritual pilgrimage. Through line and symbol, recorded in stitches, the process of pilgrimage is remembered and captured as physical artefact. The work becomes a way finder, a visible spirituality. Maps of biblical characters and the researcher will be shared as a new way of reading ‘sacred stories.’ In this way a cartography of pilgrimage invites meditation on landscapes of spiritual significance, insights, homecoming, exile and wandering as human aspects of being in a world as seekers and those sought. Connections to indigenous map-making and journey will be highlighted. Listeners will be invited to consider the cartography of their lives as a means to witness to their spiritual pilgrimage.