I’m very pleased to have been able to be part of the Little Rundle Street Art Project for 2016.

My work “Legends for Explorers in Uncharted Territories” is a mixed-media digital/linocut/monoprint/photography composite. All the quadrants are 15cmx15cm.

Statement: Love is a collaborative creative activity; we build a map beyond ourselves, with each participant’s perceptions rewriting the terrain and legends.

Details of the work:

The original linocut, terrain with a blank legend, was inspired by a visit to the Medici household in Florence. The great map room is full of documents that show perceptions of the world, represented as maps, including some highly racist references to the more southern aspects of Africa. As Korzybski noted “the map is not the territory” and this separation between the representative and actual, geographical and the geopolitical, was brought home to me, standing in this grand room where the very powerful once sought to contain a view of the globe.

I used a blended roll to achieve the rainbow colouration, as a recognition of the many forms of love, but also to subvert the traditional colouring of maps. Any two-dimensional map can be displayed with only four colours, without any two adjacent sections having the same colour, but I chose to use more to remind myself that love is not about the minimum required, it is about beauty and that is often gloriously multi-coloured.

The text was cut as a separate plate and, over time as I printed with it, developed a character of its own that I did not erase, forming a monoprint that I then printed in isolation. The four panels are formed from the original printed work, with an early text overlay, and then digital composition of the elements. The black and white terrain is a high-contrast digital photograph of the cleaned plate, reversed.

The words “Our Love” by themselves are, in the digital version, on a transparent background. This was a deliberate decision, to add to the first work where love is a lens through which a terrain is viewed, to show how self-contained the shared perception of love can be, where it can be applied over wherever you find yourselves.

Any recollection of love, whether happy or sad, is deeply personal and yet it must be affected by the actions and thoughts of others. A single map does not show us the true territory through which this love travelled, but it can give us an idea of the shape, the highs and the lows, and whether this journey is over or ongoing.

I hope that you enjoy the work. Thank you for coming to view it.