The Sunken Land
Series first exhibited at Casa das Artes Bissaya Baretto, April – August 2024
Maps are not only sources of information, but also triggers for memory and imagination. We might see somewhere we once visited, or perhaps somewhere we hope to go in the future. Even if we know nothing of the places on the map, we draw on our memories to imagine what being there might be like.
These images reflect the writing of W. G. Sebald, a German living in England, and of M John Harrison’s ‘The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again‘. These works were created before Harrison’s novel, and titled in kinship with the strange hauntings it hints at.
To create these works, sections of vintage maps of Yorkshire (UK), where I lived at the time, were used as paper negatives. Their images were printed onto other vintage maps, creating these intriguing overlays of space and time.
Like the related work ‘Sundial Map’, they are an attempt to capture this dislocation, to help us imagine what went before… and what might arise in the future.
