It is with trepidation and apprehension that I write this introduction, because this is putting into the world the entangled threads of feelings, thoughts and experiences that I have unconsciously been learning for a very long time. It is also because I have only recently been consciously pulling at and unpicking these threads. When I first heard the term ‘hindsight is 20–20’, I did not really understand what that meant; hindsight indicating a knowing and learning from and of the past, or history. As I critically reflect on these entangled threads of my artistic, pedagogic and research praxisI now understand and have a 20–20 sight of these threads; of place, bodies, the fascination with stuff-materials making, and a deeper need to bodily know and learn how we are with things, matter, materials with place/s. So, just like the ethnographer Basso's pivotal work with the Apache of North America (Feld and Basso 1996), I am also mapping place. Whereas Basso mapped the stories-words of the Apache ancestors, I am attempting to map the relations and the entanglements of how we make and learn place, and how with the matter of artistic and everyday practice we make and remake place. From this we can learn, know and understand the importance of place, to who we are and also how we are.