Across The Land And The Water

The title of this series comes from a W. G. Sebald book of poems. Having struggled through, and loved, several of his novels during graduate school, the book jumped out at me during my first visit to the Concord Book Shop. Many of the titles of individual pieces in this show come from the poems in this book.

The series of cyanotype canvas maps exists in between the black and white revisited maps and the Across the Land and the Water installation. Each sewn map line represents a walk I have taken during my year in Concord. Some I take every day, often with my dog, others were singular walks to explore a new path. I grew up in a culture that walks. To work, to school, to the grocery store, to the bakery, and to the playground, this was a constant in my early life that doesn’t exist in the same way in this country. By mapping, remembering, and giving importance to these every-day walks, these works begin to grow apart from the banality of each step taken. Allowing these maps to exist without reference to their true locations allows the interaction of color and thread to create new stories.

While trying to understand this place and my position in it, I began making cyanotype prints on paper along my walks. The cyanotype process was invented around 1840, and I imagine that Henry David Thoreau might have been able to make prints in this way during his time at Walden Pond. I am interested in the energy created by the potential of this historical connection, and have made contact prints of objects found along my path, around Walden Pond, or on my daily walks in my new neighborhood. Some of these objects occur naturally, and others were left behind accidentally; all of them leave a mark on my paper of a specific location. Each of these prints is collected to form a large map of my year here in Concord.

Each of these series includes a grid element. The grid exists on every-day notepaper in Switzerland, and has followed me since my move away from that first home. As a foundation and starting point it surfaces in my materials and exists to ground, divide, and tie together both thematic and structural elements in my work.