Conceal: Reveal

Clare MoneyThursday 9th January 20142Northumbria University

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Each of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows… in this way we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. But they need to be written according to the shapes of our inner landscapes.(Bachelard,1958:67)

The surveyor's job,… is to take instrumental measurements from a considerable number of locations, and to combine these data to produce a single picture which is independent of any point of observation. This picture is of the world as it could be directly apprehended only by a consciousness capable of being everywhere at once and nowhere in particular… (Ingold, 2000: 191)

The map is God’s view of the world since its sightlines are parallel and extend to infinity…(Tuan,1977:123)

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you. (Solnit, 2006:117)

A map is: neither inventory nor itinerary , but a litany of landmarks, calling out natural features which have been associated with human history, human whim, human folly, human interest. The names on the map and on our breath recall a past people intimate with the land: where there are fields, every field has its name. the objective map is a social inscription of the apparently personal. To walk in a named place is generally to walk where others have gone before.(Robinson,1990:67)

Cartographic ability presupposes not only a talent for abstraction and symbolization on the part of the primitive cartographer but also a comparable talent in the person who looks on, for he must know how to translate wriggly lines and dots back into real terrain(Tuan,1977:77)

The map is a construction, an abstraction an arrangement of markings that relate to spatial “reality” only by agreement not by sensory testability (Ingold,2000:227)

The reality is that no map however ‘modern’ or sophisticated the techniques of its production, can be wholly divorced from the practices, interests and understandings of its makers and users

(Ingold, 2000:225 )

On Exactitude in Science …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

In my recent work with maps, I intend to suggest a bridging of different times, provoke an acknowledgement of the temporality within the landscape and, by selectively deleting information imply an otherness to place. What happens when information is erased? Does the map cease to function or, with editing, can it speak more eloquently of the landscape by alluding to an alternative?

 I aim to explore forms of erasure as drawing, using methods such as cutting, slicing, sanding and crumpling; these interventions, I suggest, function as a developing vocabulary of mark making. With these forms of drawing I intend to reveal by removal using an interruption in the surface of the paper to intimate other possibilities for place.

  

By tracking and recording glimpses into the ephemeral, drawing can reveal a fuller accounting of the embodied life. New views, re-presentations, accidental revelation (from unconscious or unintentional) can expand the scope of knowledge. The success of a drawing’s communication depends not on faithful construction of external reality, but on whether it chronicles the draughtsman’s journey into some otherness of perception.

www.academia.edu/3736464/Seeing_More_or_Less_Drawing_as_Disposition_of_Perception

It is not that the map must leave things out if critical information is not to be drowned in a welter of ever finer particulars. It is rather that the world of our experience is a world suspended in movement…In the cartographic world, by contrast, all is still and silent…Contrary to the assumptions of cartographers...life is not contained within things, nor is it transported about. It is rather laid down along paths of movement, of action and perception. (Ingold, 2000:242)

…the proliferation of research on the body and embodied experience turns landscape from a distant object or spectacle to be visually surveyed to an up close, intimate and proximate material milieu of engagement and practice.(Wylie, 2007:167)

…the organization of representation lets us down. And yet there is the hope that in such felt capture we are not alone, that it can be made to make sense for other people, that there is a line of nonorganic life that can be drawn. A line of spirit of shared, but not necessarily understood, appreciation (Dewsbury, 2003:1910)

To draw is not only to measure and put down, it is also to receive…like burrowing in the dark, a burrowing under the apparent…(Berger, 1992: 131)

Bibliography

Berger, J. (1992) Keeping a Rendezvous, New York: VintageDewsbury J.D, (2003) "Witnessing space: 'knowledge without contemplation' Environment and Planning A 35(11) 1907 – 1932 Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment, Oxon: RoutledgeRobinson, T. (1990) Stones of Aaran: Pilgrimage, London: PenguinSolnit, R. (2006) The Field Guide to getting Lost,Tuan, Y. (1977) Space and Place, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota PressWylie, J. (2007) Landscape, Oxon: Routledge/www.academia.edu/3736464/Seeing_More_or_Less_Drawing_as_Disposition_of_Perception.