I think of collages as poems. Both take existing elements—images, language—and piece them together in new ways. When working in either medium, I collect, collate, and layer data, much as a mapmaker would, and the resulting piece orients the reader or viewer, as well as the artist, toward or within an experience. So when I make collages, and when I am making poems, I am also making maps.
In the case of this piece, called Which Way to the Ocean?, I’ve used existing maps to create a collage that looks like a map. A map of a map of a map. When collaging, I work by hand with paper, scalpel, and glue. Collage, like poetry, is precise work, painstaking. Sometimes I cut things I don’t mean to cut. Sometimes I glue something down, then think better of it. Often I get glue where I don’t want it. I make messes. I embrace happy accidents. I look at what I’ve made and ask the piece what it’s saying.
For a public art project called Confluence I am developing texts and testing reading processes, with the goal of installing mile-long writings along streets where waterways have been hidden underground.
In 2017, I lived in two antipodal places in Southern Spain and Northern New Zealand, only one hour away from the exact antipodal coordinates for each: Rota, in Cádiz, Spain; and Muriwai Beach, New Zealand.
Bound, a growing installation—a woven material data map—charts, maps, and traces multiple forms of entanglement in the face of anthropogenic climate change.
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