Utah: A Field Guide

Utah: A Field Guide is a collaborative volume of art, photography and writing collected from ten intrepid Utah life-livers and Halophyte Collective members. The project began as an open proposal in 2019 inviting participants to take one year to craft a field guide to any place in Utah meaningful (or not) to the artist for any reason. The project’s “location” had already been broadly conceived to include definitions of place, spiritual position, psychogeographies, and cosmic plane cartography; and when COVID-19 delayed the production of the volume and the landscape of our interactions and community shifted, those places and projects changed too.

What began as a document of a place became a portrait of a very strange time: each of the ten books its own record of an artist and how their window to the world transformed between 2019 and 2021.

Readers can purchase the set for $40 or loose books for $5 each. The books are:

Emily Dyer Barker: Rabbitbrush, Grasses, Thistles + Other Unknowns: The Jordan River Trail at 7800 South, Salt Lake City
Chelsey Blackman-Bray: The Vacant Lot (a stay-at-home mother’s view) A field Guide (a lot guide) An Essay about Emptiness

Jace Brittain: a field guide to the stairs which unite the upper and lower sections of road which comprise 1200 south where part intersects and the other avoids 200 east

Sara Luz Jensen: Speaking Out of the Dust

Michelle Macfarlane: Harvey Milk Boulevard & Lincoln Street: Images and Observations from a Third Floor Window Overlooking the Corner

Andrew Shaw: Grocery Erosion

Sarah Morton Taggart: Field Guide to the Jordan River Trail

Claire Taylor: Guidance in the Field

Emily Tipps: All Around You: a field guide to life at home in the course of global pandemic

Mary Toscano: A Field Guide to Island Living


Utah: A Field Guide was conceived under the direction of Emily Dyer Barker, Becky Thomas, and Rachel Zavecz.

Pamphlet cover illustrations by Mary Toscano.

Pamphlet covers letterpress printed at the Book Arts Studio in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah by Emily Dyer Barker, Michelle Macfarlane, Claire Taylor, Becky Thomas, and Rachel Zavecz.

Edition casings designed and made by Becky Thomas.

Pamphlets trimmed by Emily Tipps at the Book Arts Studio in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.

Special thanks to Michelle Macfarlane and Mary Toscano for their immense creative and editorial support, and to the many others who contributed in indispensable ways to the making of this book.