Alternative Topographies

This work records the experience of a place. It is a mapping of recollected movement informed by sketchbook studies of the landscape. Through repetition these drawings become a multilayered record rather than a linear sequence describing one event. The evidence is distorted by the imperfection of memory and the passage of time. Cartographers record known paths, roads, and landmarks. Mapmakers may record what they observe on a given occasion but once fixed, those observations are rendered inaccurate by time, weather, erosion, human and animal interventions.  In my drawings the lines spread out into every corner of a designated area and become a generic walk or journey, representative of a whole location. My lines are the bits in-between, that are not public, that do not lead anywhere, which if you followed them would take you across impassable terrain through forbidden fields and over insurmountable barriers.  They are a falsifying of the evidence but within the confines of the delineated space, constituted by the meeting of the land and the water that we call the coastline – this essentially false edge altered minute by minute by the tide – my lines have as much validity as the cartographers’ marks and symbols..  My drawn routes will not guide you anywhere but that is not their function.  They acknowledge the existence of the land surface, and its experience of human intervention,; layers of footsteps accrued over centuries crossing parts of a terrain.  In effect they retrieve the memory of the land.  Potentially these drawings lead people astray but in doing so offer alternative topographies.