Museum educator
History, teaching, and public rooms already sit on the same chart. A gallery is the week where they share a door.
History of childhood · Teaching · Public libraries
Sample chart · Studio sample
Mara Ellison
A chart of the territory, and where you stand in it.
This is Mara Ellison’s map, a life that found its fit between teaching, history, and making. Take the quiz for yours. The first pass takes about two minutes.
Tap a station to read the line that ties it to the next one.
Where this points
Mara keeps returning to the forces that make a person: early bonds, the history of childhood, the classroom where those ideas get handed on. The same attention shows up in slower materials, clay and type and ferments, and in the way she crosses a city or a pool. The thread is a wish to see how a life takes its shape, and to make objects that hold still long enough to be read.
Index
Why people become who they are
Made slowly
Looking closely
Water and streets
Work that could fit
Studio teacher
Ceramics and letterpress want a bench. Teaching wants a witness. The overlap is a class with clay on the tables.
Ceramics · Letterpress · Teaching
Public historian
Walking cities and the history of childhood suggest work that puts a private past on an actual street.
Walking cities · History of childhood · Documentary
Childhood, clay, and the city
A six-week evening class. One week of attachment in plain language, one week at the wheel, one walk that stops at the rooms where children used to work.
A pamphlet of twelve streets
Each street paired with a paragraph from the history of childhood. Printed letterpress, short enough to finish.
- A Secure Base, John Bowlby. The lectures that put attachment in ordinary language: care, separation, and the pattern a person carries.
- The White Road, Edmund de Waal. A potter follows porcelain across centuries. Making and history share the page.
- Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit. Walking as a way of thinking, which is already how Mara takes a city.
Later
A longer look, and a print you can live with
The preview and the file are free. Prints and the career report are priced, and the checkout is waiting on Stripe. Nothing is charged here.
Career report
$36
A longer look at where your interests meet: roles that could fit a real week, three small projects with an end date, and a short shelf.
Archival print
$68
The Interest Map at 12×18 inches on warm cotton rag. Same drawing as the file you download. This one you can live with.
Framed print
$148
Oak frame, a white mat, hung the way you’d hang a picture of a place you love.