B O R D E R S
An exploration in imaginary cartography.
As our global society approaches the COVID-19 pandemic’s two-year milestone, the body’s correlation with boundaries and space has become increasingly salient and palpable. Since the beginning of quarantine in 2020, I have been exploring different iterations of imaginary, abstracted cartography.
Initially, I produced abstract images emulating a watercolor aesthetic, which connote cartographic maps and terrain by staining a substrate, using materials found or repurposed liquid material; local wines, beet juices, beers, teas, berries, etc. These stains imply rough silhouettes of mapped land masses and coastlines, but their shapes ultimately take form by chance, reliant on how the pigments fall and amalgamate with the designated surface. However, these stains were thereafter outlined in ink to distinguish each pigment from one another, as well as from the negative space remaining on the surface. Pen and ink echo the structure and control implied in its intervention on the more free-flowing elements of these “paintings.”
I then shifted from analog to digital, photographing elements of these maps before digitally augmenting them. A single map fragment was repeated, flipped, and mirrored to further enforce some semblance of order among the initial chaos. The imposition of ink and technology emphasizes the role of imaginary borders and structures that exist in our own physical world and define how we, as humans, move through it. These once haphazardly arranges map representations have become ornate, orderly patterns, now harmonious and palatable to the eye. As such, this series not only confronts notions of process and material culture, but also shifting perspectives of space based on human-made frontiers and the power we imbue into imaginary parameters.
Inhabiting various coastal regions throughout my life, the divides between land, water and different land areas are concepts that have resonated with me and manifested in various ways in my body of work to date. In Borders, I have ruminated on these relationships further, accentuating the contradictions and parallels of liquid and solid, positive and negative space, distance and scale, and the somewhat vain attempts of humankind to make sense of the physical world around them.
Initially, I produced abstract images emulating a watercolor aesthetic, which connote cartographic maps and terrain by staining a substrate, using materials found or repurposed liquid material; local wines, beet juices, beers, teas, berries, etc. These stains imply rough silhouettes of mapped land masses and coastlines, but their shapes ultimately take form by chance, reliant on how the pigments fall and amalgamate with the designated surface. However, these stains were thereafter outlined in ink to distinguish each pigment from one another, as well as from the negative space remaining on the surface. Pen and ink echo the structure and control implied in its intervention on the more free-flowing elements of these “paintings.”
I then shifted from analog to digital, photographing elements of these maps before digitally augmenting them. A single map fragment was repeated, flipped, and mirrored to further enforce some semblance of order among the initial chaos. The imposition of ink and technology emphasizes the role of imaginary borders and structures that exist in our own physical world and define how we, as humans, move through it. These once haphazardly arranges map representations have become ornate, orderly patterns, now harmonious and palatable to the eye. As such, this series not only confronts notions of process and material culture, but also shifting perspectives of space based on human-made frontiers and the power we imbue into imaginary parameters.
Inhabiting various coastal regions throughout my life, the divides between land, water and different land areas are concepts that have resonated with me and manifested in various ways in my body of work to date. In Borders, I have ruminated on these relationships further, accentuating the contradictions and parallels of liquid and solid, positive and negative space, distance and scale, and the somewhat vain attempts of humankind to make sense of the physical world around them.
Borders was also made into a limited run of art books that I had the opportunity to lay out, print, glue, bound, and cut myself at CNA.
