"Tried to go to sleep, kept waking up and hearing myself snorring (sic) next to me." — journal entry from crew member Canut Glasikis of The Due Return

If you visit The Due Return — the roughly 75-foot-long, 25-foot-wide, two-story wooden ship that has made its way through a vortex of time and space over the past 160 years before being grounded as an installation piece at the Center for Contemporary Arts' Muñoz Waxman Gallery — you will see clearly how Wood Gormley Elementary School students impacted the work.

That's because the school's art teacher, Mary Olson, has invited members of Meow Wolf to work with her students on an in-class project that will become part of The Due Return installation. The Due Return opens this Friday and runs through early July at CCA, 1050 Old Pecos Trail.

"Art in the schools saves so many kids. It makes them want to come to school," Olson said during a recent classroom visit while her student charges worked with Meow Wolf adults on the project. "It's a place where they can express themselves."

At Wood Gormley, art connects to the other curriculum offerings as students are writing, sketching, designing and thinking as they create their own history for the ship.

Olson has taught art at the school for nine years and feels fortunate to have a fully-funded-by-the-school-district position that also provides money for a visiting-artist agenda.

The Meow Wolfers, she stressed, have given 100 percent to her students. In return the kids have built lanterns for the ship, written journals, made portraits of people, places and pets for the vessel, and created memory pellets, among other things. Last week the students and artists were contemplating making handprints of all the kids to mount on the ceiling of the children's bunk.

"It's a way for you to sign your art," Olson told the students.

Usha Walsh, an 11-year-old Wood Gormley student, created the Canut Glasikis diary based on the ship's genealogy created by the Meow Wolf participants. Later in Glasikis' journal, we learn that some sort of creature ate a fellow shipmate.

Glasikis is an imaginary traveler on the ship, as is Sincerity Blue, whose journal entries have been written by 10-year-old Ava McCombs. On one good day — according to Sincerity's diary — her teeth turned star-shaped. She also went swimming in a lake of pink diamonds. "I wonder what it's like to be normal," Sincerity notes on one page.

Obviously this project gives the kids the chance to let their imaginations run wild. Leila B. McKinley, 11, said art allows her to "draw anything, do anything — it makes anything possible."

McCombs echoed that thought, saying, "There's really no limit. You can say there are four suns and four sunsets. It doesn't matter. You get to enter a totally different world."

Meow Wolf artist Nick Chiarella said his group first worked with Wood Gormley students last autumn on a puppeteering project involving recycled material. Interacting on an art program with kids, he said, allows the adult artists to "go back to a mindset we all recognize as an important part of our art-making history — being free and open."

Not surprisingly, if the project gives the adults a chance to remember and rekindle the child artist within them, it also inspires the kids to believe that they can be artistic at any age. Walsh, for instance, was just one of several Wood Gormley students who said it's encouraging to see grown-ups still using their imagination and creating make-believe worlds.

The students will get their own private tour of The Due Return during a morning field trip next Monday.

Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com