Cartographica

These images seek to draw attention to individual human lives, lives that we are unable to see when we look at a map.  They are about people and their lands, and people and their countries. Each work begins with identifying nations that are facing distressing issues, issues such as environmental destruction, human rights violations, gender inequality, political upheaval, and even war. I explore these geopolitical issues through making sculptures out of maps that I tear, twist, cut, crumple and reshape. The objects become embodiments of the pathologies that each territory endures including my attempt to imagine the emotions that the people may be facing and the hardships they may be enduring. The sculptured forms take the original maps and transform them. The final piece of art—the photos I make of these sculpturally reconstituted maps— returns them to the two-dimensional form of the original maps.