Whilst maps have become objects for academic study and social scrutiny, adopting a coded formal language to describe the land, sea, terrains, towns and boundaries that we inhabit, we learn to read this complex visual language for practical purposes–to find our way or to comprehend our place in the world in relation to others. But maps have also an aesthetic allure and contain the potential for strong emotional resonance. They can be simple and logical in their familiar form or they can provide us with an opening that leads us towards unknown or imagined destinations.

We all use maps in our day-to-day lives, as sources of information about the places we visit, or the routes we are planning to take. They are in essence simplified diagrams that employ a universal visual language through which we comprehend the world we inhabit. A map can be made to inform or entertain, be enhanced by embellishment, show imaginary places, or become a work in which received iconography is used to express a personal philosophy or an experience of a particular place. And whilst mapping is essentially a method of gathering, ordering, and recording knowledge, all maps are to some extent products of our imagination too. For every map embodies a story–the story of how, where, and why it was made–and ultimately what it represents. And whilst no map is ever truly objective (being shaped or coloured by political, cultural, and social conditions or by the personal experience or imaginative projections of their maker) a map is ultimately an expression of our view of the landscape, and over and above that, an expression of us on the landscape also.

Evoking the dizzying tangle of organized chaos to be found on the streets of every heaving metropolis, through the extraction of all the discernible landmarks, the tangible signs and the locating signifiers, the simplistic presence of absence, and the resultant making-of-space‚ this subtraction and re-defining of boundaries intensifies rather than simplifies our sense of confusion, so that what remains is paradoxically specific and yet vaguely random too. By re-modeling the landscape, through the chiselling away of all surplus matter–the familiar codes, terrains and locating landmarks, the sweeping river and incisive rail network–the collection of burgeoning villages (now grown to become one seething, solid, gluttonous mass) are shown to be only tenuously strung together. And yet amid this mayhem something familiar may momentarily emerge and then instantly disappear, like a chosen card within the magicians shuffling deck, which you see for a moment but then it abruptly vanishes back inside the jumbling pack–unwittingly causing our relational comprehension to shift abruptly–so that any semblance of order is seemingly turned inside out.

born:1965, London, UK

education:

University of the Arts London - Chelsea College of Art and Design, BA Fine Art, 2008

selected group shows

Slice: Rich Mix/The Ideas Store, Shoreditch, London, 2011
Relay: Quay Arts, Newport, Isle of Wight, 2011
The Sexual Object: Salon Vert, Regents Park, London, 2011
And There Was..., Salon Vert, Regents Park, London, 2010